
V 

o > 






A C," 







***% 









-a 






^ 



O v 



^5 ^ 



^ V 



\^ ^. 






o >* aP* 






ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 



ESSAYS IN PUEITANISM 



BY 



ANDEEW MACPHAIL 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

(Cfre jftitoergitie $re?£, CamferitJ0e 

1905 



MAR - 

A 0*1 



COPYRIGHT 1905 BY ANDREW MACPHAIL 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published March IQ05 



NOTE 

The five essays which are contained in this book 
were first read before a company of artists who 
had the traditional antipathy of their class to- 
wards the spirit of Puritanism. Any one who 
should chance to read these writings is asked to 
keep that local circumstance in view. Else he 
might think that they betray the spirit of the 
amateur, of the dogmatist, of the pedagogue ; that 
is, if they be regarded as a wanton excursion into 
the precincts of literature. The persons to whom 
these pieces were addressed were of the opinion 
that Jonathan Edwards manifested the spirit of 
Puritanism in the pulpit ; that John Winthrop 
showed that spirit at work in the world; that 
Margaret Fuller's career was the blind striving 
of the artistic sense for expression ; that Walt 
Whitman's conduct was a revolt against the false 
conventions which had grown up in his world ; 
and that John Wesley endeavoured to make 
religion useful to humanity once more. 

" Et quand personne ne me lira, ay je perdu 
mon temps, de rrCestre entretenu tant d'heures 
oisifves a des pensements si utiles et agreables : 
Combien defois m'a cette besogne diverty de 
cogitations ennuyeuses f " - — Montaigne, ii, 18. 



CONTENTS 

I. Jonathan Edwards . . . . 1 

II. John Winthrop 69 

III. Margaret Fuller 151 

IV. Walt Whitman 221 

V. John Wesley 275 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 

There used to be a presumption that theology- 
had something to do with religion, and, inasmuch 
as religion undoubtedly has to do with God, the 
three, religion, theology, and God, were insensibly 
brought together into an unnatural trinity. It 
was not long before theology dominated the com- 
pact ; its devotees at once proceeded to define and 
limit the sphere within which Providence might 
exercise its beneficent influence, and religion was 
left entirely out of consideration. It is difficult 
in any compact for all the persons, if one might 
so name them, to sustain the ideal relations of 
equality in power and glory, and in this case the 
theologians went too far. The astrologers never 
undertook to say upon whom the sun should 
shine and the rain fall; there have been rain- 
makers, of course, but they lost all credibility 
long before the theologians lost theirs. 

We must appreciate the strength of the belief 
that there is an essential association between 
theology and religion, if we would have any 
understanding of the times in which that belief 



4 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

prevailed ; and we must not be deterred by the 
strangeness of the idea, for doubtless we ourselves 
possess notions which are equally curious. AVe 
hold that literature has a dominating influence 
upon life; that science has some bearing upon 
religion ; that art has something to do with mor- 
ality; that there is a perception of right and 
wrong, of good and evil, in nature. 

It is a lack of seriousness on our part which 
prevents our appreciating the full import of any 
given system of theological speculation. AVe have 
come to look upon all systems as being alike 
interesting but useless ; we think there is a great 
gulf fixed between belief and conduct, that in 
fact these have little to do with each other. 
Nothing could be more fatal to the theologians. 

Before we can begin to understand any system 
of theology, we must enter into the situation of 
the unhappy men who propounded and propagated 
it : we must appreciate their distress of mind at 
the eternity of punishment which was impending 
over their fellows, if not over themselves ; and 
we shall usually find an opposing theory in the 
nature of a revolt against this melancholy deduc- 
tion. All schemes in fact were an attempt to ex- 
plain or alleviate the unhappy situation in which 
men found themselves in this world, and if the 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 5 

f ramers did not get beyond a guess at the explana- 
tion, upon the whole, they certainly did some- 
thing towards instilling into the minds of men 
a hope of better things. 

The earliest philosophic observation of which 
we have any record is that which took note of the 
lack of sequence between conduct and its reward. 
The wicked have always appeared to flourish and 
the good have been discouraged. This was the 
problem which Job had to face, and doubtless 
patriarchs even older than he must have discussed 
the anomaly in their pastoral leisure. This af- 
flicted patriarch could only take refuge in a blind 
faith that the judge of all the world would do 
right, a conclusion which did more credit to his 
piety than to his understanding. If we could 
assign a date to this observation, we should have 
a valuable mark in the intellectual and moral 
progress of the race ; if we say the Book of Job 
was written in the time it purports to describe, 
we admit the greatest miracle of literary history, 
that so profound a work should be produced in 
times so primitive ; if we assign to it a compar- 
atively recent date, we are face to face with 
another miracle, that the poem should be projected 
into the past with such artistic completeness. It 
is as if we were to discuss whether "Julius 



6 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

Caesar " was written in the time of Elizabeth or 
in the first century. The very fact that there 
should be such a question testifies to the mar- 
vellous nature of the work ; but we are not here 
specially concerned with that, save in so far as it 
affords evidence of the profound attention that 
has always been fastened upon this problem of 
good and evil. 

The only escape these old philosophers found 
from the dilemma was to predicate that this life 
is not all, that there is in the future some system 
of reward and punishment ; that, in short, the 
injustice which men behold here is not eternal. 
The Jews never got beyond a vague outline in the 
elaboration of such a system. The most poignant 
of their poets, the writer of Ecclesiastes. perceived 
that one event happened to all ; as it happens to 
the fool, so it shall happen to the wise : that the 
wise man dies even as the foolish ; that his days 
are sorrow ; that a man has no preeminence over 
the beast ; as the one dieth so dieth the other, 
and all go into one place : all are of the dust and 
shall return to the dust again. This the wise man 
cannot endure, and he takes final refuge in the 
spirit returning whence it came, after man had 
performed his whole duty ; which is about as far 
as we ourselves have got. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 7 

The failure or success of the individual, his 
happiness or misery, were all observed to depend 
upon circumstances so fortuitous and so entirely 
beyond his control, that no principle of justice 
could be discovered in the events which happened 
to him. But human life must be looked upon in 
the mass and extent of its endurance, not as the 
junction of the past and the present in the indi- 
vidual. As Carlyle observed, " You must give the 
thing time." The great Hebrew preacher had 
previously recorded a similar observation in the 
words : " Because sentence against an evil work is 
not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the 
sons of men is fully set in them to do evil ; though 
a sinner do evil an hundred times and his days be 
prolonged, yet surely I know that in the end it 
shall not be well with him." 

It would be a large matter even to take note 
of all the attempts which have been made to read 
the riddle, and it will be enough here to follow 
that straightforward course of reasoning which 
led to the definite, if not very comforting, conclu- 
sion embraced in the doctrine of Calvinism. The 
Calvinist falls back upon the will of God for a 
solution. If God allows the wicked to triumph for 
a time, that is proof that in the end they will be 
condemned. Certainly, no one can deny the fact 



8 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

of their present prosperity. And this will of God 
was only made known to the Calvinist by re- 
velation ; but, as we enter more deeply into the 
matter, we are filled with the desire that, if any 
revelation at all had been made upon the subject, 
it might have been one which should leave the 
matter clearer than it was before. The trouble 
about all revelations is that they reveal so very 
little that people of plain common sense can 
understand ; and certainly such persons should 
have been considered in view of the likely event 
of their asking questions. 

One who is fond of taking note of the mental 
structure of his race continually finds embedded 
in it isolated fragments from the past, which are 
entirely incapable of being moulded or modified 
by the more recent flow and growth. In the re- 
ligious part of the nature these fragments are 
peculiarly large and plentiful, and singularly in- 
tractable to any influence that might make for 
development. Many of the earliest instincts of 
the race, which in the outset were in no sense 
of a religious character, still persist in the domain 
of religion and are of considerable force. 

The earliest organization of society proceeded 
upon the patriarchal theory that the eldest male 
ascendant was supreme in his own household. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 9 

His dominion extended over life and death ; and 
in the case of his children and all that was theirs 
it was unbounded. Indeed, the quality of son- 
ship differed very slightly from the condition of 
slavery. Of course, this theory was abandoned 
sooner or later : by some races sooner than by 
others ; and its place was taken by other consider- 
ations, such as locality, or the advantage of union 
for the sake of success in attack or in defence. 
The patriarchal theory persisted longest in the 
Semitic race, or at any rate in that portion of the 
race occupying Lower Asia, from which we have 
derived most of our ideas of an organized reli- 
gion. In common with all ancient societies they 
regarded themselves as being descended from 
an original stock, and that was the only bond of 
union which they could comprehend. Their politi- 
cal idea had not yet extended even to the breadth 
of being provincial. These Hebrews observed 
that other races had outgrown or cast off this 
patriarchal mould, and they explained this wil- 
ful abandonment of the birthright by the Esau 
legend, on the grounds of inherent viciousness of 
nature, a practice which is still common enough 
amongst religious people. 

The Calvinist based his religion upon this 
patriarchal theory. He adopted the Patriarch of 



10 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

the Hebrews as his God. His conception of reli- 
gion was to placate a power higher than himself ; 
and he never got beyond the fear of that power, 
however much he might try to persuade himself 
that his conduct was determined by a dislike of 
hurting the susceptibilities of that Omnipotent 
Patriarch. The whole system of Calvin, then, 
takes its roots in the disobedience of Adam. The 
Calvinist God may have been all-powerful ; but 
power is not now held to constitute a valid claim 
to obedience. The whole progress of the human 
race bears witness that at times the main duty 
of man is disobedience. Adam's act at worst was 
a revolt against authority. "Whatever grounds 
there may be for visiting the punishment for 
moral faults upon the children to the third and 
fourth generation, there are none for so dealing 
with political faults. Not Sulla, nor James the 
Second, nor Judge Jeffreys would claim as much. 
But it is worth while enquiring a little more 
closely into this fault of Adam, taking the ac- 
count as it appears in the only record open to 
our inspection, namely, in those Semitic writings 
which have obtained so wide a circulation in 
the Western world. In the second chapter of the 
Book of Genesis we are told — in addition to 
many other things into which it is not necessary 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 11 

here to enter — that two trees were planted in 
a garden, one the tree of life, the other the tree 
of knowledge of good and evil. Adam was forbid- 
den to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of 
good and evil, and the injunction was accompanied 
by the threat that if he did so eat, he would die 
that very day. After the advent of the woman, 
the serpent came upon the scene and categorically 
denied the validity of the threat, and volunteered 
the further information, that if they did eat 
of the fruit they should attain to a knowledge of 
good and evil. These simple persons followed 
this suggestion, and we have it upon the author- 
ity of the chief character in the scene — not to 
designate him by a holy name — that the opinion 
of the serpent was verified in every particular. 
The man became "as one of us to know good 
and evil," and that day he did not die ; on the 
contrary, he was turned out of the garden, lest 
he might eat of the tree of life also, and so live 
forever. Of course it is not pretended here that 
this is a true account of what really occurred, nor 
is it alleged that anything did occur, but this is 
the best information which we possess. 

The only actor who came out of this transac- 
tion with unimpaired credit was the serpent, and, 
like many another speaker of the truth in oppo- 



12 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

sition to authority, he got very little thanks from 
either side for his interference. Certainly, Adam, 
and we too, if we had any liability in so doubtful 
a transaction, might complain that we had not 
been treated with frankness, that there was an 
arriere pensee, a mental reservation in the opera- 
tion, inconsistent with a character which is en- 
titled to absolute obedience. That the Hebrews 
of lower Asia accepted this solution of the pro- 
blem of the origin of good and evil has nothing 
to do with us ; that persons of much higher intel- 
ligence in some things should accept it as the 
basis of a system involving the very serious 
matter of eternal punishment is a phenomenon 
of philosophic interest. 

All systems of theology then were explanatory, 
and nearly all were humanitarian. But a place 
of reward was held to imply a place of punish- 
ment, which is a " new thing," in spite of the 
statement of the great writer before mentioned to 
the contrary. A full consideration of this fasci- 
nating subject would lead us far into esehatologv, 
which is a hard word in itself, but one who med- 
dles with theology at all feels bound to employ 
hard-sounding terms. This " doctrine of last 
things," as revealed in the Jewish Apocalypses, 
of which there were many, some of authority and 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 13 

some of very feeble force, was always a product 
of national or personal distress : the writings of 
Daniel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah will serve as par- 
tial examples. In these weird revelations two 
different views prevailed. According to one set 
of seers only favoured persons were to rise from 
the dead ; according to another all would come 
into their reward or punishment. In the Revela- 
tion, to which the same name is attached as that 
borne by the fourth Gospel, both suppositions 
are tastefully combined. As a matter of fact the 
Hebrew Scriptures contain no clear note of an 
immortality either of reward or of punishment. 
That was left for a Jew of Alexandria, but his 
Book of Wisdom never attained to any wide 
celebrity. Saint Paul himself seized upon these 
opposing views and certainly did not leave the 
matter any clearer than he found it. The situa- 
tion in which the early Christians found them- 
selves was so distressing that they were continu- 
ally turning their eyes for relief to the last things, 
and at one time it became so acute that many 
persons were troubled, lest when they awoke from 
their sleep of death, important events should 
already have taken place which might affect their 
future state. 

Before pronouncing upon Calvinism we must 



14 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

follow the lines upon which it is constructed. 
We cannot read the " Divina Commedia " with 
any intelligence unless we understand the geo- 
graphical and other relations of its various local- 
ities, the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Para- 
diso. We cannot enter fully into the mystery of 
"Paradise Lost," or rather "hell discovered," 
unless we bring Milton's measuring apparatus 
with us. It was Milton and not Calvin who made 
a reality out of this evil shadow of good, and he 
did it with such elaboration of plan and precision 
in detail, that it appealed instantly to the imagi- 
nation and does so yet appeal. Calvin knew a 
great deal about men and this world ; about any 
other world he had no better information than 
we ourselves. That was left for Milton, and we 
have his conception in plan and section ; the 
empyrean occupying the upper area, with the 
throne at the zenith surrounded by flaming mists, 
a crystal floor dividing it from the lower hemi- 
sphere or chaos, and in a kind of antarctic region, 
hell proper. Nor are we left without a scale of 
measurement. The distance from the nadir of 
the starry universe to the upper boss of hell gate 
is shown to be equal to its own radius, which 
makes the distance from the hell gate to the 
heaven gate equal to the semi-diameter of the 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 15 

universe. These measurements may be correct, 
at any rate it is difficult to disprove them, for 
recent progress in mensuration has been along 
other and less speculative lines. If we were in- 
clined to push our studies further into this fas- 
cinating science, we might express the relation 
of distances in more abstract terms ; we could 
scarcely make them more precise. 

The Calvinistic designers reverted to the 
method of the writers of the Apocalypses, who 
prophesied a great deal upon very inexact in- 
formation, though they appear to have possessed 
in that relation a marked advantage over the 
sweet and gentle Master, who occupied himself 
very little with such abstruse calculations. In 
short, while they disclose little real knowledge of 
the place itself, we have full information upon 
the ease, one would almost say, the certainty, of 
arriving at it. Yet for the comfort of those who 
may be disturbed, the truth is here revealed. In- 
stead of being a matter of divine revelation, this 
theory of an unending punishment for the viola- 
tion of the majesty of an Infinite Being has no 
better basis than an obscure passage in Aristotle's 
Ethics : Aquinas, Sum. Theol., quaest. xcix, art. 
1 ; Calvin, Instit, 111, 25 ; Enc. Brit, vol. viii, 
p. 535. 



16 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

All the authorities upon eschatology proceed 
according to the strictest principles of the math- 
ematicians ; they do not know what they are 
talking about, and they do not know if what they 
are saying is true. They begin with an assump- 
tion ; they end with an abstraction. So long as 
the theologians keep the discussion on this high 
plane no harm is done. When they attempt to 
reduce it to the level of common sense, we can 
only define our position and endeavour to secure 
our own safety by taking refuge in this : We do 
not know how the thing is, and if you tell us we 
shall not believe you. We have hardened our 
hearts. We are in the unhappy situation of the 
Wampanoag truth-seeker who was trying to com- 
prehend the doctrine of the Trinity, that three is 
not three but one. He lamented bitterly that he 
had no skill in the deeper parts of the arithmetic. 

The controversy between theologians and men 
of ordinary common sense amounts to this : we 
talk about two different things in the same 
terms. There is nothing more harmless than 
such speculation, so long as those who do not 
care for the exercise are not reasoned into the 
one place or the other, a contingency not so re- 
mote as one would think, if one meddles with 
Calvinism at all ; for of all systems of theo- 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 17 

logical speculation, Calvinism has the greatest pre- 
tension to reasonableness. It does possess more 
than a pretension to reasonableness, for it ad- 
heres to the strictest method of logic; all other 
systems are reduced to an absurdity by the final 
admission that some higher power may intervene 
to vitiate their conclusions ; Calvinism does not 
blink at its own conclusion, which is that once 
a man is reasoned into hell, there is an end of the 
matter. 

To state the proposition baldly, the final situa- 
tion of man depends in no way upon his own 
actions, good or bad, or upon himself in any way, 
but upon the arbitrary exercise of a power quite 
outside his influence. Nothing could be more 
shocking than such a doctrine stated in simple 
language, though a thing may be shocking and 
yet be true. Indeed there is something to be said 
for this view of the case, when we consider how 
little the situation of ordinary men, even in this 
world, is influenced by what they do or what they 
abstain from doing. Their situation depends 
upon their nature, their place and station of 
birth, and upon other circumstances beyond their 
control. Most men at the end of their lives will 
agree, that, good or ill, they could not have done 
much otherwise. 



18 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

When we state the case less baldly, as we must, 
the reasonableness of Calvinism will be more 
apparent. The first man, Adam, was created in 
the image and likeness of God, in a condition of 
purity. From this he fell, and involved his 
decendants in his fall. Every man and woman 
is born with a due share of this inherent guilt, 
and, therefore, liable to all the pains of hell for- 
ever. Every child has in itself the seed of ini- 
quity, which in due season will bear its fruit. 
This fruit of the flesh is amply described by many 
writers and faithfully catalogued by Paul in his 
arraignment of the Galatians. To enable God to 
promulgate a plan of salvation out of his mere 
good pleasure, his son was permitted to take 
upon himself the punishment due to mankind. 
There was the way of escape ; but man must avail 
himself of it. We must first have faith : by which 
is meant, not the acceptance as true of things 
which our judgement tells us are false, but a will- 
ingness to accept the remedy. From this follow. 
in due sequence, justification by this imputed 
righteousness, adoption into the chosen number, 
sanctification or renewal into the original ima 

It must be noted, however, that this initial faith 
is not of ourselves, it too is a gift conferred only 
upon certain persons. God, knowing all things 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 19 

in advance, knows upon whom this gift shall be 
conferred ; therefore, a class of elected persons is 
at once established. This reasoning is faultless ; 
the only escape from its relentless result is to 
question the data, and that we may safely do, for 
Calvin is now dead a long time. We may affirm 
that there never was any such system of Scotch 
or Jewish bargaining ; we may go so far as to 
admit that even if men were created in God's 
image, certainly God never was created in the im- 
age of Calvin, and we need not now be deterred by 
the fate of Servetus, who used words to that effect. 
The thing that strikes us as incomprehensible 
is the relative inefficiency of the doctrine of Cal- 
vinism. If we admit that God took any trouble 
at all about the matter, we cannot help wonder- 
ing why he should have chosen so inefficient a 
method for carrying out the beneficent purpose, 
when another and apparently less complicated 
procedure might have been adopted. At this late 
day it is no time to be suggesting any better 
plan, since, no matter how good it might be, 
its benefits could not be made retroactive any 
more than the benefits of Calvinism. When the 
system of Chris tanity was being elaborated by 
Saint Paul, this objection was thought of, and the 
benefits of the system were conferred by a simple 



20 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

process upon those who had died before its 
discovery. The living were baptized for the dead. 
In Calvinism there was no such loop-hole. The 
tree had to lie as it fell, and the Scotch Reform- 
ers proclaimed in no uncertain language, that he 
who believed any otherwise should be damned, 
which is tolerably plain speaking. 

It is hard for us to realize how these abstrac- 
tions should have come to influence men's char- 
acter and conduct. In reality, they did not much 
influence them. What a man believes is not the 
result of reasoning and conviction ; his belief 
arises from his nature or type of character, and 
has nothing to do with the laws of evidence, save 
in the minds of rigid scientific enquirers. Even 
in such cases they rarely get beyond an intellec- 
tual assent, and that is a long way short of con- 
viction, which is bound up with the emotions, and 
alone has any motive power impelling a man to 
act. Belief has so little to do with the intellect 
that it is in the least intellectual persons we find 
it most firmly fixed, and in very extreme cases 
we call it hallucination or delusion ; persons so 
gifted with the capacity for belief we class as 
insane. In a lesser degree it is the most ignorant 
persons who have the firmest belief upon ques- 
tions about which they cannot possibly possess 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 21 

any information, — upon the action of drugs, the 
future state, the habits of animals which they 
have never seen, the influence of the moon upon 
the weather, the Tightness or wrongness of eccle- 
siastical and political doctrines. 

A man can doubtless arrive at true views in 
cases where truth is accessible, but, in such high 
matters as those pertaining to religion, his in- 
stincts and training lead him to certain inevitable 
conclusions with which truth has nothing to do. 
His reason will not be bound by anything so poor 
as the laws of evidence. By experience one may 
come to know that his strongest religious convic- 
tions are false, that the belief which he cherished 
most dearly has only a low degree of probability 
at best ; but fortunately this same experience 
teaches him also that it is hardly worth while 
discarding these conceptions for others, whose 
probability may be in a slight degree higher, and 
so he is content to leave the matter at that. 

In reality, a man's conduct is always higher 
than his belief, and it is of rare occurrence that 
acceptance of a creed extends into the region 
of action. Even in Scotland, the straitest sect of 
the Calvinists behaved towards their neighbours 
much as if they really were not convinced that 
" the bulk of mankind " was reserved for an eter- 



22 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

nity of suffering. They pretended to believe it, 
but in reality they did not. As Voltaire said of 
the Basques : " When they converse they pretend 
to understand each other, mais,je nen crois rien." 

Epicureanism at no time flourished in Rome ; 
Stoicism had an abundant entrance and was 
glorified, as one might say. These stiff, austere 
people were attracted by the stiff and austere 
character of the creed, and their character was 
made thereby still more stiff and austere by being 
confirmed in its natural bent. It was a strong 
belief suitable for strong men. The people of 
Scotland somehow acquired the belief that by 
taking much thought they could find out what 
God and man is ; that by a purely intellectual 
process they could think out a religion of their 
own, and that this occupation was their main ob- 
ject in life. It does not, however, advance the 
position much to say that the adoption of Epicu- 
reanism by the Athenians, Stoicism at Rome, or 
Calvinism in Scotland, was a result of the pecu- 
liarity of the national character, for this national 
character is ever the last refuge of the bewildered 
enquirer ; yet the fact is there. 

Calvinism has been so closely identified with 
Scotland that it is commonly looked upon as be- 
ing the mainspring of national action. In reality 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 23 

that form of religion was adopted merely because 
it appealed to the genius of the people, as Epi- 
cureanism appealed to the genius of the Greeks, 
or Stoicism to that of the Eomans. It was pre- 
cisely what the people of Scotland required: it 
was in abstract form ; it could be pursued to the 
bitter end ; it provided an explanation of the con- 
duct of more favoured people ; and it afforded 
some comfort in contemplating their prosperity. 
Finally it began to colour the character of the 
nation, and to dominate the intellectual life of the 
individual, so much so, that in the exquisite poem 
of their own Caroline Lady Nairne, so full of 
confidence in all one would love to believe of a 
future life, they can only find matter for wonder 
at the grounds for the " assurance " of the dying 
woman. 

It is now time to enquire what manner of man 
this Calvin was. We have the word of Kenan for 
it that " Calvin was the most Christian man of his 
time," which of course is not saying much ; and 
one would like a better authority than Renan 
upon so subtle a matter. If Calvin's only claim 
to remembrance was his acuteness in propound- 
ing and his skill in solving theorems in divinity, 
he would long ago have been submerged in the 
flood of common sense that has been so steadily 



24 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

rising. His claims are founded on other grounds 
entirely. Since the time of the founder of Chris- 
tianity no one has exercised so profound an influ- 
ence upon the minds of men as Calvin, and no 
single book was ever followed by such tremendous 
consequences as his " Institutio Christianae Relig- 
ionis." It contained only six chapters ; it was pub- 
lished without a name ; the author was not more 
than twenty-six years of age when it appeared. 

Calvin's great work was that he first revealed 
to the world the worth and dignity of the indi- 
vidual, which is after all the essence of Puritan- 
ism and the heart of Emerson's doctrine. He 
proclaimed that man is called of God, that he is 
the heir of heaven, and that these are the only 
claims to consideration any one may advance. In 
view of this glory, common alike to king and 
noble, to the weaver at the loom, the trader in his 
shop, the toiler in the field, all worldly and tem- 
poral distinctions faded into nothingness. "When 
a man gets into his head that he is the son of 
God, that he is co-heir with Christ, his elder bro- 
ther, he is in a bad frame of mind to admit that 
the right of king or of priest is more divine than 
his own. It was by running counter to this be- 
lief that Charles the First learned at Cromwell's 
hand "that he had a bone in his neck." 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 25 

Calvin proclaimed that all power, spiritual, 
ecclesiastical, and temporal, proceeded from the 
individual, in whose heart and conscience it had 
been deposited by God himself. That doctrine 
forced its way through three revolutions in Eng- 
land, and stands untouched till this day in every 
nation which answers to the name of modern. 
Spain had a lesson in it not so very long ago ; 
Eussia is now at school; and one or two other 
peoples are ripe for instruction. Calvin defined 
the issue : Was it to be the monarch or the indi- 
vidual? The Covenanters decided against the 
kings and drew the sword : " No, it shall not be, 
and forthwith they put on their steel bonnets." 
The sword was out for a century and a half be- 
fore this question, so simple to us, was answered 
in the Toleration Act of William the Third, and 
in the Peace of Westphalia. Also, there were 
a few words said upon the subject under a tree 
in Massachusetts in the year seventeen hundred 
and sixty-five and in succeeding years. 

This doctrine of the sovereignty of the individ- 
ual, subject only to the sovereignty of God, was 
the last lesson of the Renaissance. It was learned 
by those who had ears to hear, wherever they 
might be. Classes were formed here and there. 
There was a running together of learners from 



26 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

all over Europe, to Geneva, to Zurich, to Edin- 
burgh, and to Frankfort. The teachers were now 
in one school, now in another, and at this time the 
master mind in Frankfort was John Knox, him- 
self a pupil of Calvin. It is worthy of note that 
the main object of the Frankfort exiles was, in the 
sneering words of an opponent, " to erect a church 
of the Purity." An offshooot of this church, 
which Calvin planted and Knox watered, was 
afterwards transferred to the austere New Eng- 
land soil, where it grew in stature and in favour, 
let us hope with God, if not with men. 

It was only in Scotland that people obtained 
a complete " apprehension," as they would say 
themselves, of the profound subtlety of Calvin's 
theorem in divinity. They made it their own. 
They concerned themselves with the salvation of 
their own souls and the inferential neglect of the 
souls of less favoured persons, and these matters 
seemed of so much importance to them that they 
overlooked the far reaching political results of 
Calvinism. 

The English Puritans on the other hand seized 
upon the very heart of Calvin's doctrine — the 
freedom of the individual. They eared nothing 
for the freedom of the will, so long as the man 
was free ; it was a matter too high for them. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 27 

That has been the habit of Englishmen, ever since 
they landed in Britain, at least : a perception of 
facts, an inaccessibility to ideas. We have the 
authority of one of themselves for that. Life to 
them has always meant order and justice ; fight- 
ing and force the readiest means to these ends ; 
death and the future mysterious things inspiring 
awe, but incapable of being understood. 

To this practical and experimental temper, the 
tenets of Calvin, the freedom, dignity, and sover- 
eignty of the individual, appealed with peculiar 
force. The doctrine of the Jesuits, at that time 
being diligently propagated, curiously enough, 
fitted well with this mood. The national temper 
was rising. The war with Spain was over. The 
House of Austria had been vanquished. The pre- 
tensions of the Papacy were abated. In the 
contest with the allied temporal and spiritual 
powers, the temporal and spiritual alliance had 
got the worst of it. The Tudors, who arose upon 
the ruins of the old feudal and religious fabric, 
finished their great work with Elizabeth. The 
Stuarts were an experiment. The soul of the 
Englishman was not a dogma ; it was a fact. Ee- 
ligion was now a matter for the individual. His 
soul was his own. There was the battle-ground 
between good and evil, between Heaven and Hell. 



28 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

This was the doctrine of Calvin, and in the 
English mind it developed into Puritanism as 
we know it ; in the Scotch mind it just developed 
into Calvinism. 

It would require a large book to describe all 
the influences, up to their source, which finally 
descended to form the broad spirit of Puritanism. 
That could be attempted, too, but it would de- 
mand a display of wisdom which might not be tol- 
erable. The thing was a growth, and who shall 
say exactly how even the flower in the crannied 
wall does grow. Without being wiser than the 
subject demands, it may be affirmed that the 
Puritan spirit was first considerably developed 
under the Tudors, and ended by upsetting that 
broad-founded house as it has upset everything 
since under which it has thrust its growing roots. 
Then the Stuarts tried an experiment with it, but 
they were a mere incident ; they came too late. 
Calvin and the Bible had been there before them, 
and Cromwell in good season put an end to the 
Stuarts' foolish business. The events which led 
up to the apparent failure of that cause, which 
had seemed assured at the death of Elizabeth, and 
again at the violent death of Charles, are the 
commonplace of history. At any rate the minds 
of men faltered at the failure, yet they looked 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 89 

over the seas where they might make the experi- 
ment anew. 

Coming to this exodus, the greatest since the 
English left the shores of the Baltic, it is neces- 
sary to insist again npon the distinction between 
Calvin ist and Puritan, which is as clear as the 
distinction between the Scotch and English char- 
In the judgement of the Calvinist the unit 
of all organized society is the man himself. 
elected from all eternity, called of God. fore- 
ordained to eternal life or otherwise, as the case 
may be. The Puritan looked more to the fact that 
each man is his own priest and every such group 
of men a church, independent of all but of God. 
supreme in matters ecclesiastical and spiritual. 
The Pilgrims went a step further, and desired 
to add the control of temporal affairs to these 
functions and so make a "new experiment in 
freedom." 

The church in Xew England never was a purely 
religious institution. Very few churches in those 
days were ; at least it is now difficult to per 
what religious purpose they could have served. 
It was purely political in its practices and aims, 
and was identical with the state : membership in 
the church was essential to citizenship : in the 
phrase of the time there could be no divorce 



30 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM ♦ 

between things civil and things religious ; and the 
utmost freedom which was allowed to those who 
were unwilling to adopt this view of the case was 
the liberty of going out into the wilderness, 
though it is on record that even this poor privi- 
lege was denied to some men and to some women 
too. 

The success of Puritanism or of any great 
cause came through a series of reverses. The 
theocratic government — and, therefore, oligar- 
chic, for it is not to be expected that God will 
reveal his eternal purposes in connection with the 
erection and support of meeting-houses, the tax- 
ing of chimneys, and the impounding of cattle 
equally to all men — soon broke down utterly, and 
profanity overflowed the land like a second flood, 
as all the writers of the period testify. This tes- 
timony of preachers to the immorality of their 
times and to their own imperfect nature must be 
accepted with some reserve. The Apostle Paul 
accounted himself the chief of sinners, and if we 
had independent testimony bearing upon the con- 
dition of the Court of Herod, we might adopt a 
more lenient view than that promulgated by John 
the Baptist. It is always the dweller in the wil- 
derness who knows most about the immoralities 
of the Court ; it is to such places as Exeter Hall 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 31 

and Madison Square Presbyterian Church that 
we must look for an intimate knowledge of the 
conduct of important personages in this world 
and in the two dominions of the world to come. 

It is easy to find independent confirmation of 
the pessimistic views entertained by the moral- 
ists upon the spiritual condition of New England 
at the end of the seventeenth and the first half 
of the eighteenth century. It was one of those 
strange periods of dulness and stupidity which at 
times overtake the human race ; but if one went 
into this matter at length, he would be intruding 
in a field which Jonathan Edwards has made 
peculiarly his own, and claiming for himself an 
intimacy of knowledge with the Worker of Evil 
which no man in these days is willing to admit. 
That great philosopher described the evil agent 
as " the greatest fool and blockhead in the world," 
and gave as an instance of his wrongheadedness 
the sending of the people to New England, where 
he hoped they might be forever beyond the influ- 
ence of the gospel ; but then anything Edwards 
did not like was of the Devil. 

If this view of the exodus across the sea be 
correct, and the identity of Satan as the great 
Pilgrim be acknowledged, it would appear that 
he acted with the subtlety peculiar to him in 



32 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

such cases, in view of the kind of gospel the 
emigrants were likely to receive, before the time 
of Edwards. The more closely we enquire into 
the religious condition of New England at the 
end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the 
eighteenth century, the more are we inclined to 
applaud the far-sightedness of this great emigra- 
tion agent. There was little in New England to 
encourage a natural religion ; everything was in 
favor of the supernatural variety and it assumed 
the most fantastic forms. This supernaturalism 
quickly developed into the grossest and most 
degrading superstition, witchcraft, demoniacal 
possession, sexual immorality, and compulsory 
attendance upon church. The time was ripe for 
a great reformer, a great moralist, and a great 
preacher, and all three arose in the person of 
Jonathan Edwards. 

Jonathan Edwards was born in East Windsor, 
Connecticut, in 1703. He came of Welsh stock. 
His father was a graduate of Harvard College, 
an ordained minister for sixty years and a man 
of learning. His mother was a daughter of Sol- 
omon Stoddard, minister in Northampton, a 
woman " surpassing even her husband in native 
vigour and understanding." This must have been 
so, for he relegated to her all domestic affairs, a 



JONATHAN EDWAEDS 33 

practice one could wish had been more generally- 
followed in New England. Jonathan was the 
fifth child, the only son in a family of eleven 
children, and all were brought up in accordance 
with the well-established traditions of a minis- 
terial household. At twelve years of age, the 
boy was writing letters to refute the idea of the 
material nature of the soul ; at thirteen he went 
to Yale College, and graduated at the age of 
seventeen. The next two years he remained at 
New Haven to prosecute his theological studies 
till he received a call to a newly organized church 
in New York, where he remained eight months, 
and then returned to Yale to take up the duties 
of tutor, at the time of the secession of so many 
of the teaching staff to the Episcopal Church. 
There he remained till he was twenty-three, and 
all this time he was exercising himself in the art 
of writing. Much of this writing was merely 
transcription, some of it a catching and setting 
down of the philosophical tissue which was flying 
in the air. 

The nature of Jonathan Edwards was religious 
and not philosophical. The two are not identical 
or even complementary ; they may be in contra- 
diction. If we say his temperament was poetical, 
that would be a cryptic saying, in face of his own 



34 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

declaration that he had " a constitution in many 
respects peculiarly unhappy, attended with flac- 
cid solids, vapid, sizy and scarce fluids, and a low 
tide of spirits, often occasioning a kind of child- 
ish weakness and contemptibleness of speech, 
presence, and demeanour." These are commonly 
regarded as the ingredients of a philosopher or 
theologian, but poets too have their own pecu- 
liarities. He had intuitions as a poet has ; his 
thought was resolved into emotion, and though 
he was continually striving to convert it into a 
logical form he was never able to distinguish be- 
tween emotion and thought. In any case we shall 
be safe in affirming that he had the apocalyptic 
sense. 

A study of the child life of New England re- 
veals some of the strangest facts in psychology. 
The abnormal was the normal, and hysteria 
passed for the greatest good sense. The misery 
attendant upon the witchcraft delusion, the sto- 
ries of early conversion, accounts of the precocity 
of infants of four years of age, who indulged in 
secret prayer, in private religious meetings with 
children scarcely older than themselves, tor- 
menting themselves with visions of hell fire, — 
all these are a revelation of the morbid condi- 
tions which arose in that atmosphere. The child 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 35 

Edwards was one of these. He was continually 
engaged in looking into his little mind and form- 
ing resolutions for amendment of the faults he 
discovered there : " never to do, be, or suffer 
anything in soul or body but what might tend to 
the glory of God ; to live with all my might while 
I do live ; never to speak anything that is ridicu- 
lous or a matter of laughter on the Lord's day, 
and frequently to renew the dedication of myself 
to God." 

From childhood Edwards's mind had been full 
of objections to the doctrine of God's sover- 
eignty ; and it seemed horrible to him, as it has 
done to many maturer minds since, " that God 
could choose whom he would, leaving them eter- 
nally to perish and be tormented eternally in 
hell." At last he became happy in the accept- 
ance of this strange dogma and spent his life in 
urging its acceptance upon others. This convic- 
tion was reinforced from time to time, when he 
resorted to secluded places, " to meditate upon 
the things of God, and indulge in reverie in the 
woods of an early morning ; to look into his own 
heart which seemed like an abyss infinitely deeper 
than hell." At such times, happily, " God's glory 
was revealed to him through the whole creation ; 
His excellency, wisdom, purity, and love seemed 



36 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

to appear in the sun, moon, and stars, in the 
clouds and blue sky, in the grass, flowers, and 
trees, in the water and all nature." On one occa- 
sion, when he had ridden into the woods — he 
had now attained to middle life — and alighted, 
" to walk in divine contemplation and prayer, 
he had so extraordinary a view of the glory of 
the Son of God and his wonderful grace, that he 
remained for upwards of an hour in a flood of 
tears and weeping aloud." All this was charac- 
teristic of the gentle mystic and not of the rigid 
divine. 

Edwards was now ready for his work, and his 
opportunity came. In 1727, being in his twenty- 
fourth year, he was ordained at Northampton as 
the colleague of his grandfather, Solomon Stod- 
dard, who was in his eighty-fourth year, a man 
so venerable and of so much authority that the 
Indians referred to him as the Englishman's God. 
The new incumbent began his career by leading 
the life of an ascetic : he dwelt by himself and 
studied thirteen hours a day ; he abstained from 
all amusement and from any excess of food, 
and rarely visited his parishioners. This method 
of life only lasted a few months, for the young 
minister married a girl of seventeen with whom 
he had become acquainted at New Haven. Her 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 37 

name was Sarah Pierrepont ; her father was pro- 
fessor of moral philosophy at Yale, and on her 
mother's side she was descended from Thomas 
Hooker, the founder of the church in Connecticut. 
Edwards's habit of thought is revealed in a letter 
he wrote about this young lady some years before 
they were married, at a period it would seem 
before he had made her acquaintance. Unless 
upon the previous assumption that he was a poet, 
it is hard to guess the source from which he drew 
his information. 

" They say there is a young lady in New Haven 
who is beloved of that great Being who made 
and rules the world, and that there are certain 
seasons in which this great Being, in some way 
or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind 
with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly 
cares for anything except to meditate on Him ; 
that she expects after a while to be received up 
where He is, to be raised up out of the world and 
caught up into Heaven ; being assured that He 
loves her too well to let her remain at a distance 
from Him always. There she is to dwell with 
Him, and to be ravished with His love and de- 
light for ever. Therefore, if you present all the 
world before her, with the richest of its treasures, 
she disregards and cares not for it, and is unmind- 



38 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

ful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange 
sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her 
affections ; is most just and conscientious in all 
her conduct ; and you could not persuade her to 
do anything wrong or sinful, if you would give 
her all the world, lest she should offend this 
great Being. She is of a wonderful calmness and 
universal benevolence of mind ; especially after 
this great God has manifested Himself to her 
mind. She will sometimes go about from place 
to place singing sweetly ; and seems to be always 
full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for 
what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields 
and groves, and seems to have some one invisible 
always conversing with her." 

One result of this marriage was a family of 
eleven children, ten of whom came to maturity ; 
one of the daughters afterwards became the 
mother of Aaron Burr, who " murdered " Alex- 
ander Hamilton in a duel, became vice-president 
of the United States, and finished his career in 
a trial for treason on account of a foolish con- 
spiracy to set up a southern dominion. 

The minister appears to have ruled well his 
own household. He was " thorough in the gov- 
ernment of his children, and bent them to his 
will ; he was a great enemy to all vain amuse- 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 39 

ments and pernicious practices." It is well that 
it was Aaron Burr the father, rather than the 
son, who broke into that well-regulated house- 
hold. 

We shall leave at one side for the moment any 
consideration of Jonathan Edwards as a philo- 
sopher, though with the strange irony of events, 
it is upon this aspect of his character that chief 
attention has been fixed. He was a great preacher 
of righteousness; yet if we look only in his 
printed sermons, we shall not get very far in 
understanding the secret of his influence upon 
contemporary and subsequent life. The first edi- 
tion of Edwards's works, including his sermons, 
was issued in Worcester, Massachusetts, in eight 
volumes, in 1809, and was afterwards republished 
in four volumes. Both issues are still accessible ; 
also Dr. Dwight's edition published in New York 
in ten volumes, in 1829, and a London edition 
of eight volumes by Williams in 1817, with two 
supplementary volumes by an Edinburgh firm. 
There is also an edition in two large volumes by 
Bohn, which contains a good portrait. 

There are very few persons now living who lay 
claim to having read largely of Edwards's ser- 
mons, and there are fewer still who have actually 
done so. They are hard to master, though an 



40 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

excellent discipline, and it is only by a process of 
slow growth that one brought up in the Calvinist 
faith arrives at the perception that there can be 
such a thing as nonsense in a sermon. Preaching 
must be a dull business where the speaker is not 
sure of making himself understood ; it is much 
worse when the preacher himself does not under- 
stand what he is saying ; and when his utterances 
are reduced to writing, the confusion is worse 
confounded. When a man talks about things he 
does not understand, to people who do not un- 
derstand the terms he is using, it is easy to guess 
what lucidity there will be in his reported utter- 
ances. A writer with a fine style can interest a 
reader in things which in themselves possess no 
interest whatever ; but Edwards had no fine style ; 
his style is more involved than his matter, and 
though he could write bad Latin, that did not 
qualify him for writing good English. As Haz- 
litt observed in his own ironic way, it is easy to 
be a great preacher if a man is allowed to start 
from no data and come to no conclusions. The 
same observation of course is true about writers 
also. 

Edwards seized upon a theme and made it his 
own. He knew nothing of this world, and very 
little of heaven or of men ; he made people be- 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 41 

lieve that he knew a great deal about hell and 
devils. As a matter of fact he knew no more 
about hell than we do, and had no greater inti- 
macy with the Devil than we have, but he had the 
capacity of interesting people in the fearsome 
theme, because he himself was intensely con- 
cerned with it. Satan was God's emissary, and 
the fear of hell his chief weapon for reducing 
men to obedience and instilling into their hearts 
love for his being and a recognition of his bene- 
volent purposes. 

Jonathan Edwards was a great preacher and a 
great moralist by reason of his hatred of sin. He 
held himself aloof from the things of this world, 
and rejected the concerns of this life. Engrossed 
in exalted matters, he was not tempted himself, 
and could not appreciate the power of temptation 
upon others. His own zeal for morality was so 
great, his piety so deep, his principles so fixed, 
his ideals so pure, that he had no sympathy with 
the lower concerns of other people nor any tolera- 
tion of the things that interested them. Occupy- 
ing this exalted position, he gave way to pride ; 
unchecked by the opinions of his fellows, he be- 
lieved he was right when he was surely wrong ; 
his mind became harsh and bare when it should 
have been genial and rich, for these qualities 



42 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

only come from a tried and varied life. To 
Edwards, the soul was nothing but moral. In- 
tellect and the artistic sense did not touch it, save 
in so far as they had to do with morality, and 
intellect and the artistic sense we know have not 
necessarily anything to do with morality. He 
demanded grandeur and purity alone, caring 
nothing either for beauty or for richness. 

The normal mind appreciates certain things in 
nature and draws its own conclusions from them. 
That was how the Greeks arrived at their notions 
of religion. The Calvinists, and Edwards with 
them, found the source of religion in the mind, 
not in the world without, and they say they know 
how it was implanted there. All reasonable men 
agree that there is a moral principle in the 
human nature, a desire to do right, or at least 
a dislike of doing wrong. We do not claim to 
know how it got there, and if any one tell us we 
shall not believe him. The most we are willing 
to do is to make the feeble admission, along with 
Sir Leslie Stephen, that nearly all men go so far 
as to desire to do right, and that there are very 
few to whom wrong-doing is a positive pleasure. 

The fatal error in Edwards's doctrine, and in 
the Calvinists' too, is their explanation of the 
forgiveness of sin. Not the blood of any sacrifice 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 43 

can atone for it, nor the fires of the Calvinist hell 
purge away its stain, In the portentous words 
of Bishop Butler, " things are what they are, and 
the consequences of them will be what they will 
be." It seems more difficult in these days than 
in times past for men to discover the eternal 
purposes of God, and lay bare the methods of 
divine procedure. We have some reticence in 
affirming what God can do and what God cannot 
do, but we shall be well within the mark in as- 
serting that God himself cannot forgive sins in 
any such rough and ready, good-natured method 
as has been attributed to him. The healing of 
the sick, the raising of the dead to life, the arrest 
of the elements in their course — all these we 
can pretend to understand. But the divinest 
thaumaturgy of all is the conversion of evil into 
good. That is the only sense in which God can 
forgive sin, and it is by the conversion of evil 
into good that he reveals in the highest his in- 
finiteness of power, of patience, of mercy, and of 
justice, and it requires an eternity of time to com- 
plete the transformation. If it were not so, evil 
in the end must triumph over good, and that we 
do not believe, for we could not believe it and live. 
However, the value of this fear of hell is not 
to be despised as a moral agent, for in all 



44 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

times the average conception of religon has been 
to placate a power not ourselves. Certainly, Ed- 
wards's parishioners in Northampton received the 
full benefits of this moral agent, and it was not 
a bad device in so far as their minds were won 
over to serious things. 

All writing about Jonathan Edwards is the 
merest trifling if one do not give some account of 
the part he played in the great revival that was 
coincident with the times in which he wrought. 
The present writer has lived through two of these 
manifestations ; as a detached observer, it is true, 
— in the earlier one on account of youthf ulness ; 
in the later, on account of hardness of heart or 
other incapacity. And these revivals too were 
associated with a still earlier one, and that in 
turn by tradition was directly traceable to what 
is known in evangelical circles as the Great Re- 
vival of Edwards. The most casual reader of 
history is struck by the frequent occurrence of 
these strange upheavals of the moral nature, at 
one time manifesting themselves by wholesale 
crusades against some fanciful infidel, by the 
burning of heretics, and again by the harassing 
of priests and the destruction of churches. At 
rare intervals they have taken the form of an 
awakening and a reformation of the individual 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 45 

character, as was the case in the great movement 
with which Wesley had to do. 

However these revivals may be described, — as 
" a sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry 
trees," as " an outpouring of the spirit," as " a 
troubling of the waters," — at bottom they have 
been due to a revolt on the part of humanity 
against the accumulation of evil under which 
at length it felt itself to lie. They have always 
occurred when the people were seized with a 
great idea ; and in the case of the revival which 
is called "great" the dominating idea was the 
immediate association of the divine spirit with 
the soul of man. That idea arose in the mind of 
Jonathan Edwards with new force. Calvin had 
fixed a great gulf between God and man, yet 
even he made an attempt to bridge it by the 
work of the Spirit ; Luther endeavoured to bring 
the two into some kind of communion through 
the medium of devout feeling ; it was left for the 
Puritan churches to insist upon proof that the 
gulf had been bridged, and to Edwards to preach 
the doctrine of the immediacy of God, the same 
which Paul preached on Mars Hill, that "He 
is nigh unto every one of us." This then was 
the great work of the New England preacher, 
and it was taken up in due time by Wesley and 



46 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

Whitefield in England, and finally by Emerson 
and Whitman and the Unitarians in America. 
Who then shall say it was not a great work ? 

Whilst the fervour lasted, there was much 
confusion : the minds of many men and women 
became disordered by excessive fear and concern. 
When they were convinced of the fate in store 
for them, they did not accept the situation calmly, 
but lay in agony, with wild outcries, and an in- 
ward fear that was unutterable. The pastor found 
nothing unusual in this manifestation of concern ; 
for did not John fall at the feet of Jesus as one 
dead? did not Jacob dislocate his thigh? and did 
not the disciples toil all night? Some few are 
said to have received an assurance that their fears 
were groundless, that they were safe from the 
divine vengeance ; and a man in that happy situ- 
ation is not apt to bear himself with humility ; 
indeed he is liable to take his stand behind a new- 
found security and presume that he may sin with 
impunity. However that may be, we soon find 
Jonathan Edwards confessing " that many of 
these high professors were fallen into great im- 
moralities, that their conversation was more in 
keeping with the character of a sailor than of 
a Christian, and that they were manifesting an 
incorrigible wildness in their behaviour." 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 47 

The reaction had come. The people of North- 
ampton had been told that "the bulk of man- 
kind was reserved for burning," that " innocent 
as children seem to us, they are not so in God's 
sight, but are young vipers, and infinitely more 
hateful than vipers ; " that they themselves, those 
decent village people, " were all over deformed 
and loathsome as a filthy worm, little wretched 
despicable creatures, vile insects risen up in con- 
tempt against the majesty of heaven and earth ; " 
but these statements did not receive any general 
acceptance. One man, however, did believe what 
he heard, and he adopted the sensible procedure 
of cutting his throat. Edwards took it as a mat- 
ter of course that " persons should murder them- 
selves under religious melancholy, who would not 
have done so had they remained in heathen dark- 
ness ; " but if all the people had believed, there 
would not have been trees enough in Massachu- 
setts whereon to hang themselves. They listened 
with more or less apathy, just as children, who 
are insensible to the sin and misery and sorrow 
which are in the world. 

That is ever the fate of all appeals to the emo- 
tions; the stimulus must be increased, but at 
length the healthy nature will reassert itself. So 
long as Edwards was content to deal with sin in 



48 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

general terms, no one took offence, but when he 
undertook to apply his epithets to individuals, 
they took it for incivility, and all, good and bad, 
save twenty out of two hundred, united to turn 
him out of the community which he had served for 
twenty-three years. Yet it must have been with 
a sense of relief that they witnessed his departure. 
There would be peace, at least so long as they 
remained in this world, and that was something. 
They were content to let the Devil have his own 
way for a little ; probably familiarity with that 
important New England personage had bred con- 
tempt ; yet it must have brought consolation to 
the exile, to know that some of his parishioners 
who had been most zealous in stirring up strife 
were afterwards stricken with remorse, and even 
went so far as to apply to themselves the subject- 
matter of the imprecatory psalms. 

The situation of the dispossessed minister was 
one of difficulty. He was past middle life ; he 
had a wife and ten children dependent upon 
him, and he was without means. Some help came 
from Scotland in the way of books and words of 
encouragement to continue the controversy, which 
perhaps was not the best advice. A call soon 
came from the church in Stockbridge, a frontier 
settlement composed entirely of Indians, and there 






JONATHAN EDWARDS 49 

Edwards went in 1751, under appointment from 
the Board of Commissioners for Indian Affairs 
in Boston, and with some support from England. 
This interest in the Indians was a form of exag- 
gerated sentimentality peculiar to the time, and 
it was fostered by all of those who took up the 
" Return to Nature " cry, raised by Rousseau and 
the poets of the eighteenth century, who were 
more gifted in folly than any poets before or 
since. Under its influence both Wesley and 
Whitefield had gone to preach in Georgia. 

There is something irresistibly comic in the 
idea of Jonathan Edwards being ordained as 
a miss ionary to th e Indians. Amongst the older 
writers it was a favourite theory that the Indians 
would readily be won over to the Christian reli- 
gion, and would accept with unquestioning faith 
their account of its mysteries. They were led to 
this conclusion, an erroneous one as it afterwards 
proved, by their misconception of the nature of 
the Indians and of the nature of Christianity 
also. This wild offspring of Adam's degenerate 
seed were able to comprehend the doctrine of the 
Jesuits in so far as it could be expressed in im- 
ages ; they never even got to the length of under- 
standing pictorial representations, because their 
knowledge of art did not extend to the subject 



50 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

of drawing on plane surfaces. To them a saint 
drawn in profile was only half a man. One con- 
vert apostasized as soon as it was revealed to 
him, through a more profound knowledge of ex- 
egesis, that the sword of the spirit was not pri- 
marily intended for the rending asunder of the 
joints and bones of his enemies, and another lost 
all consolation from the Christian religion when 
it was borne in upon him that the pains of hell 
were reserved for members of his own tribe also, 
and it might be for himself as well. It is no won- 
der then that the savages found the religion of 
New England too high for them, and if their new 
missionary had spoken his mind freely upon the 
subject of their future state, it would not have 
been more tolerable to them than it had been to 
the inhabitants of Northampton. 

In the selections from the unpublished writ- 
ings of Edwards, by Gossart, we have the skele- 
ton of a sermon which he preached to his new 
charge through an interpreter. The subject was 
worthy of the occasion, and the treatment was 
after the best manner of the author of the M Free- 
dom of the Will." Calvinism from the mind of 
Edwards, through the mouth of an interpreter, to 
the mind of the North American Indian, is an ap- 
palling thing to consider ; yet the new missionary 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 51 

did not fail in his duty. He divided and sub- 
divided his subject ; he elaborated and condensed, 
and yet it is doubtful if his hearers comprehended 
the full import of his doctrine any better than 
we do. 

The history of Indian affairs at Stockbridge 
was pretty much like the history of Indian affairs 
in other parts of the United States before and 
since, a record of peculation, oppression, and 
abuse. Against these Edwards made good head- 
way and drove the offenders from the field, but at 
the end of two years his congregation had van- 
ished further into the forest, and he was once 
more relieved from his charge. These years, how- 
ever, were years of " pleasure and profit " to the 
philosopher. He had leisure for writing, and 
the more he wrote " the more and wider the field 
opened before him." It was here he wrote and 
published the " Freedom of the Will," and his 
treatise on the " Nature of Virtue," and " God's 
Last End in the Creation of the World." Here 
also he wrote his famous work on " Original Sin," 
and besides these performances he had leisure to 
meditate upon a great matter. This was a history 
of the Redemption. It was to be a "body of 
divinity in an entire new method, being thrown 
into the form of a history." It was to begin and 



52 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

end with eternity, and all great events were to 
be viewed sub specie aeternitatis ; heaven, hell, 
and earth were to be the scenes ; it was to in- 
clude " all divine doctrines, showing the admir- 
able contexture and harmony of the whole." Such 
a production would have been a fairly marvellous 
feat, but it never came to anything. All persons 
who write much have such visions of grandeur, 
but fortunately they never proceed very far to- 
wards the realization of them. 

From these happy labours Jonathan Edwards 
was called in 1757 to be the official head of 
Princeton, then as now the earthly seat of all 
authority in the Presbyterian religion of the 
United States. He occupied the position for less 
than three months, and died on the 22d of March, 
1758, in the fifty-fifth year of his age, as a result 
of inoculation with the virus of smallpox. 

It yet remains to turn to that side of Ed- 
wards's nature which was essentially philosoph- 
ical. Many of the speculations with which the old 
philosophers tormented themselves appear to the 
ordinary man as so much rubbish. He thinks 
there is no use bothering with them, because he 
knows that, in what used to be called philosophy, 
the only certainty is that any given proposition 
is probably false. In some cases the probability 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 53 

may be high, and in others low, but when the 
thing is likely to be equally true and equally 
false, he thinks he might as well be pitching cop- 
pers. Many of these problems we have already 
solved to our own satisfaction ; in the words of 
Dr. Johnson, we know the will is free and that is 
the end of it ; some we are content to leave in 
obscurity, as Dr. Johnson also was obliged to do, 
when the revelation he was about to make upon 
the future state was interrupted by an untimely 
visitor ; about others we have no means of know- 
ing, and the remaining ones have no interest for 
us. But it has not always been so. There was 
a time when men had a passion for enquiring into 
those things which the Germans call the uncon- 
ditioned, about which nothing can ever be learned, 
and to leave aside those things of which the truth 
may be ascertained by diligent enquiry. 

With the singular irony of events it is upon 
his philosophic speculations that the fame of 
Jonathan Edwards rests, and according to the 
measure of philosophers he was of no mean rank. 
The subjects he treated were as profound, his 
method as obscure, his course of reasoning as sin- 
uous, his conclusions as unintelligible, as those 
of any pioneer into the Teutonic mysteries. It 
does not interest us now whether the will be free 



54 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

or not, or what may be the nature of true virtue ; 
no one now defends or attacks the proposition 
of original sin, or claims that one is sometimes 
three. It may be so, but we have other things to 
bother about ; yet a mind that was interested in 
these subtilties and resolute to deal with them 
must always possess a profound interest for us. 
It is, therefore, worth while observing the work- 
ings of the mind of Edwards upon these sub- 
jects, leaving at one side as much as possible any 
consideration of the subjects themselves. 

The earliest manifestations of Edwards's philo- 
sophic activity were revealed in his fourteenth 
year in " Notes on the Mind." These early notes 
contain the germinal thought of all Edwards's 
later philosophy, and deal with the will and its 
freedom, ideas abstract and innate, causation and 
the association of ideas. In his doctrine of ex- 
cellency one finds an agreement with Plato's con- 
ception of the good ; in his doctrine of the one 
substance, he is in agreement with Spinoza ; and 
his proclamation that the universe exists only in 
the mind of God is precisely that of Malebranche. 
Such expressions as " bodies have no existence 
of their own," " all existence is neutral," M the 
existence of all things is ideal," " matter is truly 
nothing at all, strictly and in itself considered," 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 55 

" I had as well speak plain, space is God," are 
almost in their entirety a reproduction of the 
philosophy of Berkeley. Space may be God, but 
even so, the definition does not go very far 
towards clarifying our conceptions of either the 
one or the other. 

If Edwards between the ages of fourteen and 
seventeen had elaborated such a body of doctrine 
as is revealed in his " Notes on the Mind," that 
would have been a record in precocity, and his 
biographers claim that he did so, on the ground 
that there is no evidence that he had read any 
of Berkeley's writings. These notes were written 
up to the year 1819 and perhaps later ; the " New 
Theory of Vision," the " Principles of Human 
Knowledge," and the " Dialogues," had been pub- 
lished several years earlier by Berkeley. There 
is another fact : Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards 
President of King's College, New York, was dur- 
ing Edwards's career at college a tutor at Yale, 
and he was a warm friend and ardent follower 
of the great English idealist. At any rate there 
was something in the air, and at that time the 
interchange of ideas between the old world and 
the new was as complete if not so swift as it is 
now. If we assume — there are some things we 
cannot prove — that the lad was informed of the 



56 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

speculations of Berkeley, we avoid the admission 
of a miracle, which is always a desirable thing; 
but we must still wonder that so young a child 
should have taken so profound an interest in 
them as to put them in his own words, and that 
was a miracle in its own way. There is no dif- 
ficulty in assuming that the young philosopher 
had access to the writings of Malebranche, for 
the " Recherche de la Verite " had then been 
before the public for forty years ; two good trans- 
lations into English had been made before 1704, 
and Norris had worked over the material for his 
" Theory of an Ideal World " at least as early as 
that. 

It matters little what other sources of sugges- 
tion he possessed, for, speaking absurdly, Locke's 
writings were in the hand of every schoolboy, 
and Locke had boasted to Lady Masham that 
he himself had read Descartes and Spinoza, and 
that what he read had been intelligible to him. 
Edwards acknowledged freely his indebtedness 
to Locke ; he makes no reference to his obliga- 
tions in other quarters, but we must bear in mind 
that he was of a reserved nature, and after some 
pages of cipher writing he adds : " remember to 
act according to the proverb, *a prudent man 
concealeth knowledge.' " 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 57 

Locke has been the source of more inspiration 
than that which Edward derived from him ; in- 
deed nearly all the good and much of the evil 
that occurred in the eighteenth century is trace- 
able to the wisdom and common sense, the calm 
reasonableness and reverence for facts of this 
great philosopher. The French Revolution was 
the logical deduction from his postulate that the 
ultimate sovereignty of a people rests on a virtual 
consent or contract to be governed. Of course 
the French went too far, as the Calvinists also 
did, in the destruction of the wicked ; the English 
alone can be trusted to stop short of absurdity in 
pushing conclusions home, because the English 
mind has a contempt for pure reason, a hatred of 
abstractions which are contrary to common sense, 
a distrust of speculations which do not fit in with 
some rule of thumb by which they have been 
working for three or four generations. Ethics 
and philosophy and even theology they think 
must be kept in their place, along with steam- 
engines, macadamized roads, and spinning-jennies, 
and all are to be brought to the same test of experi- 
ence. That is why the English philosophers have 
been kept from working mischief, in their own 
country at least. 

But Edwards never got so far as to develop a 



58 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

harmonious system. To him the works of Hobbes 
and Hume were only corrupt books, and yet in 
making virtue a second object of life, without 
knowing it, he fell into agreement with the utili- 
tarian theories of Hume, Bentham, and Mill ; his 
theory of the Will is now held only by professed 
agnostics, and by a few who call themselves 
Christians. 

I shall speak in another place of the value of 
the mathematical method in solving historical 
problems. The analogy between mathematics and 
history is very close. There is a method of analy- 
sis by which relations are deduced amongst quan- 
tities by considering the relations existing between 
infinitesimal variations in those quantities ; that 
is to say, by the consideration of infinitesimally 
small quantities we may attain to finite results. 
The edifice of history is built up stone by stone, 
but from absolute lack of material, insignificant 
as that material may appear to be, there must be 
wide gaps in the structure. It is a favourite occu- 
pation of beginners in the integral calculus to 
prove strange things by the use of that method 
of analysis, that one is equal to three and three 
to one ; but the fallacy lies in the improper em- 
ployment of the symbols denoting Nothing and 
Infinity. The relation which exists between the 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 59 

diameter and the circumference of a circle is indi- 
cated by a symbol and cannot be completely 
expressed in any terms, words, or figures of which 
we have any knowledge. Every intelligent boy 
has amused himself in seeking a fuller expression 
of that relation by the addition of more decimal 
places, and always with the belief and secret 
ambition that by searching the thing could be 
found out ; but with more mature knowledge he 
is obliged to fall back upon the symbol. Jona- 
than Edwards had faith that he could express in 
set terms relations which can only be expressed 
by symbols, and he confused the symbols denot- 
ing Infinity and Nothing. That is why he has 
proved strange things. 

In the text of the " Essay on the Trinity," as 
recently published by Professor Fisher, there are 
fine examples of the adaptation of the mathemat- 
ical method to the solution of " theorems in divin- 
ity," from which one illustration will serve : " In 
order to clear up this matter, let it be considered 
that the whole divine office is supposed to subsist 
in each of these three, namely, Gr., his under- 
standings, his love, and that there is such a won- 
derful union between them, that they are after 
an ineffable and inconceivable manner one in an- 
other, and as it were predicable one of another ; 



60 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

as X. said of himself and the R, I am in the F. 
and the F. in me, so the F. is in the Son and the 
S. in the F., the H. Gh. is in the F. and F. in 
the H. Gh., the H. Gh. is in the S. and the Son 
in the H. Gh., and the F. understands because the 
Son is in him, the F. loves because the H. Gh. is 
in him, so the Son loves because the H. Gh. is in 
him and proceeds from him, so the H. Gh. or the 
divine essence subsisting is divine, but under- 
stands because the Son, the divine Idea, is in 
him." Edwards from this formula would con- 
clude : Q. E. D. We may be permitted to sub- 
stitute our own conclusion : " Which is absurd." 
We may also question the propriety of reducing 
the Lord Jesus Christ to the terms L. J. X. 

One might be convicted of ignorance — and 
that justly — if he did not give expression to the 
suspicion which has been in the minds of some 
for the past half century, that Jonathan Edwards 
was tinctured with heresy. The thing is unthink- 
able to any but Unitarians ; it is as if one were 
to say that the Pope was not a Catholic. The 
most malignant of these disseminators of doubt 
was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who has since gone 
to his own place. It was alleged that an unpub- 
lished manuscript existed in which was revealed 
the true relation existing between the various 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 61 

Persons in the Trinity, a matter which Edwards 
refused to disclose in his published writings. 
The legends which grew up around this manu- 
script would be long to describe. Some pretended 
to have seen it, but no two persons could agree as 
to what they had seen, or recognize the thing 
when they saw it again. Some who had access 
to the writing affirmed that it was in two parts, 
a comparatively simple observation, one would 
think ; others held that it was divided only " in 
fact but not in form " into two parts, and when 
put to the question they could only make the 
feeble admission that on second view they " recog- 
nized " the document but could not " recall " 
what they had read of it on previous occasions. 
That hesitancy of recollection is not wonderful 
to one who reads the manuscript in its present 
published form. Whether the document acquits 
Jonathan Edwards of heterodoxy or not, I do not 
pretend to say, — Professor Fisher thinks it does, 
and one is willing to take his word for it, — but 
certainly this mysterious manuscript whicfi be- 
came so singularly involved with the persons of 
the Trinity still "leaves the matter in a state 
of obscurity." 

The situation developed by Edwards was a seri- 
ous one. He began with the sovereignty of God 



62 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

and the sinfulness of man ; he showed how deserv- 
ing of eternal punishment all mankind was ; he 
described a place which was in every particular 
most suitable for the purpose; and finally, near 
the end of his life, he wrote a great book to prove 
that no man had any choice as to where he should 
spend his eternity. The truth of the matter is that 
the argument won instant favour, because it dealt 
a heavy blow at the Arminians, who held the will 
to be in equilibrium, and it assisted men like Dr. 
Chalmers " to find their way through all that 
might have proved baffling and transcendental 
and mysterious in the peculiarities of Calvin- 
ism." 

For the moment the Arminians were staggered 
and Edwards's posture of defence was unassail- 
able ; but in the course of time they found that 
the ground on which he stood was unsafe, because 
it was shifting. His definition of the will at one 
moment was " that by which the mind chooses any- 
thing ; " and again, " that by which the mind de- 
sires or inclines to anything." Between u choice " 
and " inclination " a great gulf is fixed. This may 
be a mere " nibbling " at his argument ; but if 
Edwards himself were to rise from the dead, lie 
w r ould admit that, inasmuch as his argument is 
in large part based upon a purely idiosyncratic 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 63 

interpretation of Scripture, it must come to the 
ground. The dictum of Saint Paul is no longer 
recognized as sufficient foundation for the airy 
fabric of a metaphysical system ; as the German 
theologian observed, " I have read what Paulus 
says on the subject and I do not believe him." 
We are content, then, to leave at one side his 
ethical and metaphysical speculations as being 
merely of literary interest. They may be true; 
we have no means of knowing ; but they are of 
no further interest to us. 

But Jonathan Edwards's influence in the sphere 
of morality is of supreme interest to us as reveal- 
ing his own personality and the nature of the 
people who came under its sway. It is as a 
preacher of righteousness, not as a philosopher, 
that he appeals to us, though we must admit that 
his philosophical reduction of transactions to 
abstract formulae inevitably gave form to his 
doctrines of morality. 

In American literary history all appreciation 
has been based largely upon purely "idiosyn- 
cratic grounds," as Emerson said of Margaret 
Fuller's criticism of the plaster casts in the Boston 
Athenaeum. In the case of Jonathan Edwards 
again we are met with the same indiscriminating 
praise and blame. Over his grave one may read 



ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

to this day an inscription in Latin, it is true, tes- 
tifying that he was second to no mortal man. Of 
course, one does not go to tombstones in search of 
truth, yet the view there established is in keeping 
with much that one reads elsewhere. Another 
writer says that since the time of Plato there has 
been no life more simple and imposing in grand- 
eur than that of Jonathan Edwards. Robert Hall 
regards him as the " greatest of the sons of 
men ; " another eminent divine was accustomed to 
look upon him as belonging to some superior race 
of beings ; and Chalmers, with his peculiar fecund- 
ity in words, writes that he esteemed Edwards 
as the "greatest of theologians, combining in a 
degree that is quite unexampled, the profoundly 
intellectual with the devoutly spiritual and sacred, 
realizing in his own person a rare harmony be- 
tween the simplicity of the Christian pastor and 
the strength and prowess of a giant in philo- 
sophy." As a corrective to this nonsense we may 
set down the opinion, which is also probably 
nonsense in its own way, of President Stiles of 
Yale College, as recorded in his diary : " "When 
posterity occasionally comes across Edwards's 
writings in the rubbish of libraries, the rare 
characters, who may read and be pleased with 
them, will be looked upon as singular and whim- 



1 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 65 

sical as in these days are admirers of Suarez, 
Aquinas, or Dionysius the Areopagite." 

This prediction of President Stiles has been 
fairly well verified. The philosophical writings of 
Jonathan Edwards have long since gone into the 
rubbish of libraries, along with much other philo- 
sophical rubbish, it may be added ; his sermons 
merely move men to scorn or mirth. Wherein, 
then, consists the secret of the power which 
Edwards exercised and does still exercise ? 

He had a great and a good nature ; he lived a 
great and good life ; he was under the domination 
of great ideals, and his life was entirely detached 
from the things of this world. This great nature 
was the product of his Celtic inheritance, made 
serious by his more immediate Puritan ancestry 
and his solemn environment. He saw things 
which other men did not see, therefore he was 
a seer; he spoke for them, and was a prophet. 
He aroused them from habits of sloth and sensu- 
ality to a perception of serious things. True, the 
means he employed was the fear of hell, yet at 
times fear is the only moral agent of very much 
value, a means of grace of which this generation 
unfortunately is deprived. 

One thing yet remains to be said — said again. 
Though Jonathan Edwards is dead, he yet speaks 



GG ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

to us, and the message comes clearer from his dis- 
ciples than it came from him. His son expanded 
the doctrine of the efficacy of the atonement, and 
his grandson, Timothy D wight, by his preaching, 
turned back that mingled tide of atheism and 
deism which proceeded from France early in the 
last century. Nathaniel Emmons lived for ninety- 
five years and was engaged in actual ministerial 
work for fifty-four ; he trained fifty-seven pupils 
in his own family, and through them propagated 
the doctrine of disinterested love which he de- 
duced from Edwards's treatise on the u Nature of 
Virtue." How he did it we do not know. Samuel 
Hopkins disseminated the same views upon the 
obligation to love ourselves and our fellow men, 
and through the work of 'William Ellery Chan- 
nfng and his friends, the thing grew into the great 
humanitarian movement which, beginning in New r 
England, spread over the whole nation and is yet 
spreading. 

The only real good which ever comes to hu- 
manity is that which arrives by way of the emo- 
tions, and emotions arise out of a condition of 
mind. When the present devices of philanthropy 
shall have had their day, and their futility shall 
have been demonstrated, some great teacher will 
rediscover the old truth that salvation lies in a 



JONATHAN EDWARDS 67 

right condition of mind ; he will awaken the peo- 
ple and revive in them those emotions which are 
religious. 

The old name for a revival was an awakening, 
and Jonathan Edwards awakened the people 
thoroughly. Once awake they could be trusted to 
find a way out for themselves. The path they 
followed has not been precisely the one which was 
marked out for them by the great divine, but it 
led in a new and right direction. To turn the 
people anew and aright is the greatest work that 
any man can accomplish, and it is for this supreme 
reason that the name of Jonathan Edwards is 
held in remembrance. 



n 

JOHN WINTHROP 



JOHN WINTHROP 

In dealing with the personality of John Win- 
throp, let it be understood that he lived at a time 
in the world's history when men had convictions 
upon subjects in regard to which we have none, 
and that their conduct was shaped by beliefs 
which do not influence us. These convictions had 
to do chiefly with what they caDed religion, a term 
which we shall continue to employ in the sense in 
which they understood it, laying aside our own 
preconceptions or conclusions as to what religion 
really is. 

We, in these days, have the instinct for doing 
right, or, as Jonathan Edwards defined it, "a 
rectitude, a fitness of benevolence to the soul and 
the nature of things ; " we have the dislike for do- 
ing wrong even more highly than our fathers had, 
but in matters of religion we do not possess any- 
thing more than what that great divine described 
as " mere notional knowledge." The atmosphere 
in which we live is so free, the field is so wide and 
open, that we wander whither we will, with no 
outside force to drive us into this corner or into 



72 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

that. We know how hard it is to prove a thing, 
and that after all our conclusions may be wrong. 
Why then should we suffer or make others suffer 
for a conclusion which at best has only some de- 
gree of probability in its favour ? 

Before notional knowledge can bear much fruit 
it must be vivified by emotion. A man may hold 
the belief in a general way that the celebration of 
the Mass is, or is not, an idolatrous performance, 
and according to his custom he may abstain from, 
or assist at, its celebration. If by compulsion his 
habitual practice is interfered with, then his re- 
ligious emotion is aroused, and a whole continent 
is aflame. That is the story of every religious 
war. The passion for religion is dormant in us. 
Nothing has occurred this century past to arouse 
it ; but it stirs uneasily at times, and only requires 
some rude shock to awaken it to full fury. It is 
not dead but sleeping. 

No task to which the historian can set his hand 
is so difficult as the correct estimate of a situ- 
ation which has become involved in religious 
controversy, because in it the factors are so 
numerous, and the things which are low and the 
things which are high are so subtly mixed. The 
task has in itself all the difficulties inherent in 
the attempt to ascertain the truth about any 



JOHN WINTHROP 73 

event, whether occurring in times present, or in 
times past, and to it is added the problem of deal- 
ing with truth and falsehood uttered in passion. 

" Truest poetry is most feigning " — we have 
the authority of the greatest of poets for that ; 
and the same observation is largely true of that 
form of writing which is called historical. Indeed, 
most history is most lying, and the mean between 
two lies is not always the truth. The makers of 
historical novels have reduced history writing to 
its legitimate conclusion. 

This difficulty of arriving at the truth of 
matters which have happened in times past has 
long been a favourite subject of reflection, even 
for historians themselves, but they have not gone 
to the length of admitting the impossibility of the 
task. What, after all, is historical truth ? There 
is, of course, something like it, something that 
does duty in its stead ; and the most that can be 
claimed is that the thing is a theory of history, as 
theology is a theory of God. 

The fact of the matter is that the truth about 
things past cannot be ascertained. No two persons^ 
will agree about the occurrence of an incident in 
a football match ; how then can more than two 
persons agree about the series of events which is 
called a battle, or the sequence of events which 



74 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

is called war ? No person can tell the whole truth 
about anything ; if two persons be employed upon 
the task, the chance of arriving at the truth is 
exactly halved. If historians are incapable of 
ascertaining the truth about the things which they 
have seen, how shall they tell us anything reliable 
about the things that interested past generations 
of men ? If the physician has some difficulty in 
arriving at the diagnosis of a case when the 
patient is alive, what chance is there, even with 
the assistance of a pathologist, that his judgement 
will be correct after their material has fallen 
into dust? All written history then is merely 
a probable or plausible explanation of what 
occurred. Instead of the historian revealing the 
past, his history only reveals the man who has 
written it, his race, nationality, politics, religion, 

# temperament, and character. An historian is 
counted. great in so far as he can make the past 
to live ; but if he can make it live he can also make 

<S it lie. Historians are dramatists. They choose 
their characters. They decide beforehand upon 
the effect they intend to produce and adjust their 
narrative accordingly; u for," as Montaigne 
observed, " since the judgement leans to one side. 
they cannot keep from turning and twisting the 
narrative according to that bias." 



JOHN WINTHROP 75 

A new way to approach history is by the mathe- 
matical method. A mathematician cares nothing 
for truth ; he cares only for the relation of the 
factors whose value he does know, or for the re- 
sults that will come from certain assumptions 
which he has made ; and, if a mathematically 
minded person were to apply himself to history, 
he would see at a glance that in dealing with 
historical events he should have to employ the 
method of assumption. He would devise some 
symbol to represent the truth of the case, which 
he would probably designate by the letter T ; he 
would let t equal the time elapsed since the al- 
leged occurrence of the incident, and n the num- 
ber of narrators, h the coefficient depending upon 
circumstances, and m a function varying directly 
with the narrator's motive for lying. Out of 
these elements, if that be the proper term to 
employ, an ingenious historian might construct 
a tentative formula for the solution of historical 
problems. 

The value which should be assigned to these 
various factors would have to be determined by 
what the mathematicians call "investigation." 
The factor &, which is the coefficient of circum- 
stance, would prove to be the most indefinite 
element ; but one might begin by assigning to it 



7G ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

a certain range of value, as between .01 for Froude, 
to take an example, and .001 for Cotton Mather. 
The range between what is considered reliability 
and open mendacity would, however, not be very 
great in any case. Enough has been said to indi- 
cate the method, as the mathematicians them- 
selves say, and it is put forward in all modesty 
as a basis for a new essay in history. Whatever 
be the ultimate result of the plan, it will prove 
a fascinating exercise, assigning a value to these 
coefficients in the case of the various representa- 
tions of past events. One who was well acquainted 
with Guizot said of him that the thing which he 
knew only since morning he pretended to have 
known from all eternity ; and another, who dis- 
liked Voltaire, affirmed that his method was to 
collect everything he knew to be false and write 
it down as history. Obviously the value of the 
coefficients as applied to these two writers would 
not vary widely. 

One of the most historically fascinating pro- 
blems which has been presented to the human 
mind is that which goes by the name of Puri- 
tanism. The record of the series of events which 
culminated in that phenomenon is open to every 
enquirer ; and yet, even from an identic*] narra- 
tion, two persons will come to an exactly opposite 



JOHN WINTHROP 77 

conclusion in respect of the essential nature of the 
thing. To the one it will appear as a " panther," 
and its opposant a " milk-white hind, immortal 
and unchanged ; " and we all know the hard things 
which the New England divines were in the habit 
of saying about " the black sons of the scarlet 
woman," and of " the harlot who had her seat on 
the seven hills of Eome." Probably in both cases 
the factor which I have called a function varying 
directly with the incentive for lying, has an identi- 
cal value, and that a very large one. 

If I were so far left to myself as to meddle 
with the matter of Puritanism at large, I should 
proceed according to the method outlined, tak- 
ing into account the time elapsed, the number 
of narrators, the variations in their narratives, 
the value of the coefficient depending upon the 
circumstances under which the accounts were 
written, making a particular estimate of that 
function which is concerned with the motive for 
lying, and I should endeavour to reduce this 
final equivalent to zero in the case under sup- 
position. The present intention, however, is 
merely to consider the personality of one wit- 
ness, —John Winthrop, — and to endeavour to 
ascertain the value of his evidence, as expressed 
in his work, by establishing his character. 



78 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

If we knew the heart of John Huss, John Cal- 
vin, John Knox, Oliver Cromwell and his great 
companions, as we know the heart of John Win- 
throp, we should be down among the roots of 
Puritanism. Knowing the heart of John Win- 
throp, we know the essential nature of the New 
England emigration, how it came about, and 
what it meant to the world. His life is open 
before us in his letters and journals, and with 
a singular candour of spirit they give the fullest 
expression to his most secret thought. We may 
read in them of his self-consuming love, the bit- 
terness of his grief and his overwhelming sorrow. 
We have a faithful account of the process by 
which he was led up to the greatest sacrifice 
which a man can make, of wife, home, family, 
and tradition. We may also read that he sent 
men away from his judgement seat to be whipped, 
because they held opinions contrary to his own. 
Surely then it is worth while reducing to small 
compass the presentment such a man makes of 
himself, doing it faithfully, and continually test- 
ing it by the abundant collateral information of 
contemporary events which is accessible to us. 

John Winthrop was born in 1588, the year in 
which the Armada was defeated : and the gen- 
eration which had witnessed that defeat also wit- 



JOHN WINTHROP 79 

nessed the forces for which the Armada stood, 
entrenched behind the throne of England. The 
descendants of those stout sailors were resolute 
that they would not endure the thing, but they 
differed in their method. To Cromwell and his 
friends it seemed the most natural thing in the 
world that they should take a sword in their 
hands. To others the readiest way was to depart 
over seas and make a new experiment in freedom. 
John Winthrop was the leader and inspirer of 
those who adhered to the latter view. 

The first fact to establish in estimating a per- 
sonality is the environment of the man ; his class, 
and hence the habitual bent of his mind; his 
family and friends; in short, his outlook upon 
the world. In the letters of John Winthrop, 
published in 1864 by Kobert Charles Winthrop, 
fifth in descent from himself, we find as frontis- 
piece a reproduction of a portrait of the First 
Governor, " by Vandyke," and another in the 
body of the book, " by Holbein," depicting his 
grandfather, Adam Winthrop the second. This 
portrait of Governor Winthrop is still to be seen 
in the old Senate Chamber in the State House in 
Boston, now used as a reception room. It cer- 
tainly adorned the austere walls of the Govern- 
or's New England home, and was given to the 



80 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

" town house " by his eldest son. There is, of 
course, no historical evidence that the portrait 
was painted by Van Dyck, but certainly it does 
possess many of the characteristics of that mas- 
ter, — a fine sense of proportion, an elegance of 
outline, and that precious blending of the figure 
with the background in light, shade, and colour. 
The picture by Holbein is in possession of the 
widow of the Robert Winthrop before mentioned, 
and rests on the walls of her house in New York, 
38 East Thirty-Seventh Street. Of the authen- 
ticity of this picture there seems to be no doubt, 
even from an examination of the engraving, 
which is done on copper in line and stipple. If 
the portraits are authentic, it is significant of the 
position of the Winthrop family in the social 
order of England, though there is independent 
evidence of that. From a note upon the subject 
of these portraits, by R. C. Winthrop, Jr., one 
would gain the impression that he was read- 
ing a letter by the hand of the first Governor, 
on account of the singular similarity of the 
writing. 

To this day we may read in the register of the 
parish church of Groton an entry recording the 
death of that Adam in 1562, and one may still 
look upon his tomb graven with the family's name 



JOHN WINTHROP 81 

and arms. The family mansion, which adjoined 
the church, has long since disappeared, but the 
garden plot is still marked by the traditional 
mulberry-tree, which reminds one of Professor 
Masson's acute observation, recorded in his " Life 
of Milton," that great men, wherever they go, 
invariably plant mulberry-trees. 

All this is more interesting to the descendants 
of the Winthrops than it is to us, but even to us 
it is significant of the position which the First 
Governor occupied in the world. His father kept 
a diary and almanac, from which we can recon- 
struct the family life in its smallest detail, even 
to the hanging of the " great mastiff e, a gentle 
dog in the howse, but eyes oft blind." Winthrop's 
mother wrote charming and scholarly letters to 
her husband; curiously enough, one which remains 
is written in French, and deals with the forward- 
ing of a French bible. The family life was nobly 
lived. 

John Winthrop's youth was passed in the man- 
ner proper to the son of an English gentleman of 
those days. He went to Cambridge, and upon his 
return he took up the duties and obligations of 
his station in life. Long years afterwards, in the 
New England fastness, he wrote an account of his 
Christian experience, but we must not lay any 



82 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

stress upon his confession, that in his youth " he 
was very lewdly disposed, inclining unto all kinds 
of wickedness, such as writing letters of mere 
vanity." He protests, however, that he never 
attained to the length of " swearing and scorning 
religion/' All great and religious men have fallen 
into this habit of self-accusation, and if we be- 
lieved what the Apostle Paul and John Bunyan 
tell us of their early lives, we should say that they 
were well worthy of the galleys and the gaol. 

There is a profound psychological reason for 
this self-accusation, on the part of the great relig- 
ious men of New England especially, and some 
persons may endure reading it, if it be set down 
shortly. Up to the time of Jonathan Edwards, 
admission to the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper 
was more or less a social and political test, an 
acknowledgement on the part of the authorities 
that the communicants were free from the more 
open forms of vice and from opinions hostile to 
the welfare of the community. If a man commit- 
ted adultery, or refused to pay his taxes, or spoke 
slightingly of the ministers or magistrates, the 
table was " fenced " against him, as we used to 
say. If he observed the ordinary usages of the 
society in which he lived, and kept his mouth 
shut, no questions were asked. The Sacrament 



JOHN WINTHROP 83 

then was a means of grace, a converting ordinance, 
out of which some good might come. Edwards's 
own grandfather, the venerated Stoddard, adhered 
to this view, which was the one openly recognized 
in all the New England churches. 

But from the beginning there was a secret dis- 
sent from this practice, and many of the best men 
felt in their hearts that coming forward to the 
table was an open sign that the communicant had 
attained to a newness of life, to a submission of 
his will to the will of Grod, and a union of his 
spirit with the spirit of God ; that, in short, it was 
an affirmation of his justification, a proclaiming to 
the world that he had undergone that mysterious 
change commonly called conversion. Edwards's 
own mother declined to come forward for ten 
years after her marriage, until she had attained 
to a full assurance of the completeness of that 
change. As Edwards's ministry grew, he gave 
entire assent to this awful significance of the 
Communion, that men and women who took the 
mysterious elements in their hands and partook of 
them unworthily did but eat and drink damnation 
to themselves. It was upon this vital question that 
the great preacher was banished from Northamp- 
ton still farther into the wilderness. In order, 
then, to signify to themselves the completeness of 



84 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

their conversion, and if possible its instantaneous- 
ness, these good men were fond of dwelling upon 
their early iniquity, in proof of their present justi- 
fication. If sin did not exist, they were obliged to 
create it, and that is the source of most religious 
confessions from the time of Saint Paul to last 
night's experience meeting. 

It would be the business of a great writer and 
the subject of a great book to trace the develop- 
ment of John Winthrop's nature, as it grew from 
strength to strength, to follow its course until 
at length a great light dawned upon him, and he 
saw in all its hideousness and nakedness the 
stupidity and wickedness and sorrow in which his 
country lay. The moment of that perception is 
the starting point of all movements towards good. 
In a complete record of AYinthrop's life we should 
also find expression of his love and tenderness and 
bitter sorrow over his own ; pity and concern for 
his neighbours ; industry and energy in the dis- 
charge of his public duty ; indignation and wrath 
against those who were working prblic evil. 

At length the time came when he was willing 
to forsake all and pursue into the wilderness the 
chimera of perfection. He drew up his reasons 
for it, which were : to carry the gospel : M to pro- 
vide tabernacles and food as a refuge for the 



JOHN WINTHROP 85 

church against the time she must fly," and for his 
fellow men, " the most precious of all creatures, 
who were become of less price than a horse or a 
sheep." He saw " a whole continent lying waste, 
whilst it was impossible for a good and upright 
man to maintain his charge at home ; fountains 
of learning were polluted," — in short, the time 
had come. 

There was a great correspondence and a furious 
running to and fro, as when a company of bees 
decides to swarm. In a letter to his " verye lov- 
inge wife," dated October 20, 1629, Winthrop 
writes : " So it is that it hath pleased the Lorde 
to call me to a further trust in this business of 
the Plantation (being chosen by the Company to 
be their Governor). The only thinge that I have 
comfort in, it is that hereby I have assurance 
that the Lorde hath called me to this work." 

Governor Winthrop's record of his voyage to 
New England in the Arabella has the freshness 
of narration which one observes in the account of 
the casting away of that Alexandrine ship in 
which Saint Paul sailed to Italy. Thus : " We 
tacked again and stood W., but about noon the 
wind came in full W. a very strong gale, so we 
tacked again and stood N. and by E. ; at night 
we took off the main course, and took in all our 



86 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

sails save only the main and mizzen. The storm 
continued all the next day, the wind as it was and 
rainy. In the forenoon we carried our forecourse 
and stood WSW., but in the afternoon we took 
it in, the wind increasing and the sea grown very 
high, so lying with the helm aweather we made 
no way but as the ship drove." This was evi- 
dently Winthrop's first adventure upon the sea, 
for he takes note of everything ; how a tub in 
which some fish were salting was overturned, how 
a swallow, a wild pigeon, and another small land 
bird perched in the rigging. He also observed 
the decreasing declination of the pole-star, the 
apparent smallness of the moon, and the contin- 
ued coldness of the weather, no matter from which 
quarter the wind blew. 

A good discipline was observed on board the 
Arabella ; that was the Governor's way. On the 
third day out, whilst a fast was being observed, 
two of the landsmen pierced a rundlet of strong 
waters ; for this they were laid in bolts the whole 
night through ; in the morning the principal of- 
fender was openly whipped, and both were kept 
upon bread and water for the day. Shortly after- 
wards two young men fell at odds and the quarrel 
ended in a fight. This, it appears, was contrary 
to orders, which had been duly published, and the 



JOHN WINTHROP 87 

passionate fellows were adjudged to walk upon the 
deck till night with their hands tied behind their 
backs. Another young man, for using contempt- 
uous speech in presence of the notable persons 
on board, was also laid in bolts till he submitted 
himself and presented open contrition for his 
offence. The passengers must have been persons 
of some consideration ; most of them were accom- 
panied by servants; some bore titles ; and the daily 
life was conducted with a degree of grandeur. 

The discipline was impartial. Complaint was 
made to the captain that one of his under-officers 
had done grave injury to a landsman, whereupon 
he was ordered to be tied by the hands with a 
weight about his neck ; but at the strong inter- 
cession of Winthrop the punishment was recalled ; 
that was also Winthrop's gentle way. A much 
more intricate case had to be adjudged. It ap- 
pears that a servant of one of the Company had 
sold to a child a box which was said to be worth 
threepence, and made the excellent arrangement 
that he should receive in lieu of a money payment 
one biscuit a day whilst the voyage lasted. This 
thrifty trader then sold the biscuits to his fellow 
servants ; but when he had obtained about forty 
biscuits, his sharp practice came to light, and he 
was sentenced to have his hands tied to a bar, 



88 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

a basket of stones was suspended about his neck, 
and there he stood for two hours. That is the 
earliest record of trade methods in the annals of 
the United States. 

The voyage of the Arabella was not free from 
the miseries attendant upon sea travel in those 
days, arising from want of room, sameness, if not 
actual scantiness, of food, and sea-sickness. Com- 
plaint was made by the captain " that the landsmen 
were very nasty and slovenly, and that the gun- 
deck where they lodged was so noisome with their 
victuals and beastliness that the health of the 
ship was endangered." The Governor " after 
prayer " dealt with this also in his resolute way. 

The remedy for the disorder of sea-sickness 
then, as now, was indulgence in alcohol, and one 
maidservant went so far with that prophylactic 
measure as to become senseless. The Governor 
observed, as many another transatlantic traveller 
has done since, that it was a common fault 
amongst grown people at sea to give themselves 
to drink hot waters very immoderately. At the 
end of a fortnight, many children, and adults too, 
lay groaning in the cabins ; they were driven out 
and were made to stand, some on each side of 
a rope, which they swung up and down till they 
were merry again — a pretty device against the 



JOHN WINTHROP 89 

malady. Other trivial exercises followed, in which 
Winthrop noticed the usual tendency on the part 
of sailors to play the wag with the passengers. • 

In those days a ship was a little world ; children 
were born and people died; the observances of 
religion were attended to, and the voyage was 
arranged as if it were never to end. Even on the 
high seas small boats were continually passing 
from ship to ship, to convey and accept invitations 
to dinner, to procure the services of a midwife, to 
borrow fresh water or hooks for Catching codfish. 
One visitor at breakfast on board the Arabella 
was Captain Burleigh, " a grave comely gentleman 
of great age, who offered much courtesy and re- 
ceived a salute of four shots out of the forecastle 
for a farewell." He had been an old sea-captain 
in Elizabeth's time, and being taken prisoner, was 
kept in a Spanish dungeon for three years, but he 
and his three sons were afterwards captains in 
Roe's voyage. Another visitor encountered upon 
the sea was Sir David Kirke, whose adventures in 
Canada and Newfoundland entitle him to a place 
amongst the English seamen of the sixteenth 
century. 

The voyage of the Arabella was not without its 
spice of danger. It was threatened by what was 
thought to be ten sail of Dunkirkers, and every 



90 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

precaution was taken to meet them resolutely. 
The officers took down some cabins which were in 
the way of the ordnance, they threw overboard 
everything which was subject to taking fire, hove 
out the long-boats, put up the waist-cloths, and 
served out arms and ammunition. Finally, when 
the women had been sent below into a place of 
safety, and all arrangements completed, Winthrop 
and his company went to prayer upon the upper 
deck, putting their trust in the Lord of Hosts and 
" the courage of their Captain," as the recorder 
was prudent enough to observe. The danger 
from the elements, however, was a real one, and 
the whole account of the voyage is one dismal 
record of " stiff gales and stormy boisterous nights, 
in which the sea raged and tossed exceedingly.' , 
The voyage lasted from Easter Monday, the 29th 
of March, to the 12th of June, — 75 days. After 
sighting Cape Sable and skirting the Maine coast, 
the adventurers finally cast anchor inside Baker's 
Island, and at two o'clock John Endicott, Gov- 
ernor of Salem, came on board, all with due firing 
of cannon, for the thing was done in proper fashion. 
Governor Winthrop had begun his work. 
Within forty days he had opened his court and 
assisted at the ordination of a minister, elders and 
deacons, and sent a man to prison for injuries 



JOHN WINTHROP 91 

offered to the Indians. Next he attacked social 
problems, and by example and precept restrained 
the intemperate use of drink. 

Death, too, was busy. The Lady Arabella of 
the house of Lincoln died within a few days of her 
arrival in the country, and her husband a month 
later. The people lay in tents and contracted 
scurvy, of which many died, and for the first few 
years we read continually that scores died on the 
passage out. Men were drowned by the upsetting 
of canoes, by falling through the ice, or were cast 
away on the ledges and shoals that skirted the 
coast. They were lost and frozen in the woods and 
marshes, and sometimes were succoured and some- 
times murdered by the Indians. The Governor 
himself passed a night in the woods, but, " what 
with gathering wood, what with walking to and 
fro by the fire singing psalms," he wore away the 
time. 

Within twenty days of landing the Governor 
makes this entry in his journal : " My son, Henry 
Winthrop, was drowned at Salem." That is all, 
and there it stands in its reticence and austerity. 
Henry Winthrop was not a helpful son. He had 
ventured to the Barbadoes as a planter, and there 
he received such a letter from his father as many 
another wandering son has deserved. Amongst 



92 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

other things, he was told that the tobacco he had 
sent home was " ill-conditioned, foul, full of stalks, 
and evil-coloured." But now the boy was dead. 

The father did not wince ; he had already looked 
death in the face : " On Thursday in the night 
she was taken with death, and about midnight 
called for me. When I came to her she seemed 
to be assured that her time was come and to be 
glad of it. In the mean time she desired that the 
passing bell might ring, and when the bell began 
to toll, some said it was the four o'clock bell, 
but she, conceiving that they sought to conceal 
that it did ring for her, said there was no need 
as she heeded it not and it did not trouble her. 
At noon, when most of the company were gone 
down to dinner, I discoursed with her of the 
sweet love of Christ, and she showed by her 
speeches and gestures her great joy and steadfast 
assurance. When I told her that she should soon 
see her Redeemer with those poor dim eyes, she 
answered cheerfully; when I told her that the 
day before was twelve months she was married 
to me, I perceived she did mistake me. While 
I spake to her she would lie still and fix her eyes 
steadfastly upon me, and if I ceased a while, her 
speech being gone, she would turn her head to- 
wards me and stir her hands as well as she could, 



JOHN WINTHROP 93 

till I spake, and then would lie still again." The 
Wednesday following she was buried in Groton 
chancel, " and her child was laid with her." 

We can form no estimate of what Winthrop 
did, unless we are clear about what he aimed to 
do. His object was to set apart a body of men 
who entertained identical views as to their rela- 
tion, purpose, and place in the eternal order of 
things, and desired to subsist by the exercise of 
their faculties, unhampered by influences which 
lay beyond themselves. Winthrop did not formu- 
late his purpose in these large words ; probably 
he thought it would be best expressed by the 
term " trading church." 

To attempt such an enterprise was quite legiti- 
mate and proper. Other colonies had been estab- 
lished in the New World with as definite an 
object in view. Virginia owed its existence to 
the taste for tobacco, which European men had 
acquired. Pennsylvania was settled by men who 
believed that trade could be carried on with kind- 
liness. Khode Island was a purely commercial 
enterprise without much concern about religion 
or charity. New Netherland was a single colony 
seated on Manhattan Island, and it was most 
concerned about rum and slaves. Albany was 
a centre for the fur trade, anxious chiefly to keep 



94 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

on good terms with the Indians. Even in Massa- 
chusetts there were numerous colonies, each ani- 
mated by its own guiding principle. The pil- 
grims who settled in Plymouth, for example, 
desired in reality the opportunity of worshipping 
God in their own way. They were reasonably 
willing that others should exercise the same 
privilege and yet remain within the community. 
The people of Boston entertained a different 
view. 

There are colonies, nearly as old as Winthrop's, 
which exist to this day, and are yet admirably ful- 
filling the purpose for which they were founded, 
trading, paying dividends, and guarding their 
rights to an exclusive commerce. The Hudson's 
Bay Company has been in existence these three 
hundred years. It was founded for a specific 
purpose, and there is no evidence that its officials 
have ever manifested an extreme degree of cor- 
diality towards unauthorized persons, who would 
interfere with them. Even the eminent philan- 
thropist who is now at the head of that great 
Company would probably not lay claim to any 
great toleration of interlopers. 

In accordance with this idea of a trading church, 
a colony was established on the inner shore of 
Massachusetts Bay, at Boston, and at Newtown, 



JOHN WINTHROP 95 

since called Cambridge. Those who were of like 
mind with the founders were free to join. Those 
who held contrary views were free to go else- 
where, and no one was compelled to adopt the 
ideas, or conform to the views which the majority 
of the colonists entertained. When the church in 
Salem was being set up, two persons protested 
that they were dissatisfied. They were desired to 
take ship and proceed to England. When Roger 
Williams declared that he was not in harmony 
with the principle upon which the community 
was established, he was privately notified by Win- 
throp that he was free to withdraw beyond the 
jurisdiction of the Company and join with per- 
sons whose views were more in accord with his 
own. He followed this advice and set up for him- 
self on Narragansett Bay. When Mrs. Hutchin- 
son and her friends discovered their dissent, they 
also were urged to depart. Some of the Com- 
pany proceeded to New Hampshire and there 
established towns. Others went to Rhode Island 
and laid the foundations of Providence. From 
these colonies in turn new dissenters went out 
into the wilderness, and in new places found free- 
dom of thought and action, with no interference 
from their neighbours. The greatest exodus of 
all was toward Connecticut, and there in reality 



96 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

was laid the foundation of the United States as 
we know it to-day. The movement was perfectly 
free. Men who were dissatisfied with their strange 
environment returned home, or sought refuge in 
some other community ; or, failing to find satis- 
faction there, they boldly sat down by themselves. 
There is a provision in many seeds for their 
dissemination. In like manner the seeds of Puri- 
tanism were sown broadcast throughout New 
England. 

The proceedings of that court in London at 
which the new governor was chosen were not so 
transparent as might appear. The thing was 
a revolt. The Massachusetts Company was at the 
mercy of the King whilst its headquarters re- 
mained in London, so they resolved to transfer 
legally the whole government beyond the seas. 
Once entrenched behind the rocks of New Eng- 
land they considered themselves safe. They wen 
safe, and are to this day. It was John AVinthrop 
who did it. 

However the emigrants might attempt to dis- 
guise it from themselves, the exodus was a revolt 
from the church and state of England, as sincere, 
if not as open, as the rebellion of Cromwell. The 
formal declaration of their intention was post- 
poned, it is true, for a century and a half, but 



JOHN WINTHROP 97 

the events which culminated in 1776 were only 
the culmination of events which began to operate 
long before 1620. The American Kevolution, we 
know, was in no sense the last desperate effort 
of despairing men, groaning under oppression 
and goaded by tyranny. No men of English 
breed have ever groaned or been goaded long; 
they always looked to the matter with the first 
weight or the first thrust. They, at least, — what- 
ever the Hebrews of Lower Asia did, — always 
could and always did kick against the pricks. 
The New England exiles were no oxen. Their 
rebellion was systematic, and was so understood 
in England. 

Once they were safely over sea the minds of 
the colonists quickly grew familiar with the idea 
of an absolute separation. As early as the year 
1634 all the ministers in the colony met at Bos- 
ton, at the summons of the Governor and assist- 
ants, to consider what ought to be done if a gov- 
ernor-general were sent from England ; and they 
agreed that " in such an event we ought not to 
accept him, but defend our lawful possessions, if 
we were able, otherwise to avoid or protract." 
That is the way of success in all rebellions, to 
defend our lawful possessions if we are able, 
otherwise to avoid or protract. 



98 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

Not all the inhabitants were of this politic 
mind, or the magistrates either. John Endicott, 
Governor of Salem, with his sword slashed the 
red cross of Saint George from the banner of 
England, and so left no doubt of the political 
and religious sentiments which he entertained. 
The court was wise enough to notice the incident, 
but because they could not agree, the case was 
deferred till the next general meeting. The com- 
missioners for military affairs gave order, " for 
the meantime," that all ensigns should be laid 
aside. At the next meeting a suspiciously formal 
enquiry was made, and Endicott was adjudged 
worthy of admonition, on the grounds that, w> if 
he judged the cross to be a sin, he did content 
himself to have reformed it at Salem alone, not 
taking care that others might be brought out of 
it also, laying a blemish upon the magistracy, as 
if they would suffer idolatry, and give occasion to 
the State of England to think ill of us." No men- 
tion was made of the offence itself, but the magis- 
trates undertook to write to England in this 
sense, " expressing our dislike of the thing, yet 
with as much wariness as we might, signifying 
that though we were very clear that the fact, as 
concerning the manner, was very unlawful." 

The possibility of an attempt to force a gov- 



JOHN WINTHROP 99 

ernor-general upon the colonists was ever before 
their eyes. The colony was not five years old 
when tidings were received of the commission 
issued to the Archbishops and ten of the Council 
to regulate all plantations, to call in patents, to 
make laws, and raise tithes. They were advised 
at the same time that ships and soldiers were 
on the way to compel them by force to receive 
a governor and the discipline of the Church of 
England. All this occasioned the magistrates to 
" discover their minds to each other, which grew 
to this conclusion, that five hundred pounds more 
were raised to hasten our fortifications." 

When war finally broke out between Cromwell 
and the King, the interest which the colonists 
took in the matter was purely academic, or rather 
theological. At a court in 1644, Captain Jenyson, 
whose military and political qualifications are set 
forth with singular enthusiasm, was brought to 
task for questioning the lawfulness of the Parlia- 
mentary proceedings in England. He made the 
ingenious defence that being a church member 
he should first have been dealt with in a private 
way, and the magistrates came under censure for 
their precipitancy. The culprit satisfied both sides 
by " professing that he was assured that those of 
the Parliament side were the more godly, and 



LofC. 



100 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

though if he were in England, he might be doubt- 
ful which side he should take, yet if the King or 
any party should attempt anything against this 
Commonwealth, he should make no scruple to 
spend estate and life and all in his defence against 
them." That was in the true New England spirit, 
so Captain Jenyson "was dismissed to further 
consideration." Loyalty to them was no blind un- 
reasoning fealty. At an earlier court than that in 
which Captain Jenyson was dismissed to further 
consideration a scruple arose about the oath 
which the magistrates were to take, — " you shall 
bear true faith and allegiance to our Sovereign 
Lord, King Charles." After due consideration it 
was " thought fit to omit that part of it for the pre- 
sent;" which was avoiding and protracting again. 
AVhen the King finally made his submission 
to the Parliament, the colonists were advised to 
44 send over some one to solicit for them, the 
Parliament giving hope that they might attain 
much ; " but these wily old Puritans, having con- 
sulted about it, " declined the motion on the 
grounds that if they should put themselves under 
the protection of the Parliament, they must then 
be subjected to all sueh laws as the Parliament 
might impose, in which ease it might prove very 
prejudicial to them." 



JOHN WINTHROP 101 

The fact of the matter is that the colonists 
regarded themselves as independent from the 
first moment of setting foot upon New England 
soil, and from that moment their every effort was 
directed towards some form of government which 
should meet their new conditions. At length, in 
1639, by the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, 
a state government was called into existence. A 
general republic was created, composed of three 
towns, with equality of representation, with a 
governor and upper house, elected by a plurality 
of votes. In none of the articles of this Constitu- 
tion was the slightest mention made of any coun- 
try or any sovereign beyond the seas. Nor were 
there any theoretical considerations of equality 
and liberty. The thing was taken for granted. 
The towns and their inhabitants were the re- 
positories of all authority. Finally, in 1643, all 
the inhabitants between the seacoast and the Con- 
necticut River prepared to bind themselves into 
a confederacy, of which the articles were most ex- 
plicit, and gave no account of any allegiance owed 
to any other country whatever. 

Nothing was further from Winthrop's mind 
than the establishment of a " democracy " in the 
new world. He had another purpose entirely, 
which was to establish an absolute community of 



102 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

church and state ; but he was soon to learn that 
his project was impracticable. He turned away 
from it quickly and endeavoured to find a new 
and better way. This hesitancy of mind between 
the old and the new explains his mingled severity 
and kindliness, his conciliation and repression, 
his untried experiments, and his holding fast to 
that which he knew. 

Once Winthrop had cast aside the old theo- 
cratic idea of government, he had to feel his way 
between the bigotry of Endicott, the rashness 
of Dudley, and the foolishness of John Cotton ; 
between the sheer obstinacy of the elders and 
magistrates on the one hand, and the recalci- 
trancy of the people on the other. If we would 
follow the tortuous course of early New England 
history, we must take John Winthrop for our 
guide. We should find the Governor now lead- 
ing, now following, at one time stumbling over 
justification by faith, again turning aside from a 
covenant of works, and always with the hesitancy 
of a man who has left behind the guiding prin- 
ciple which had once been so sufficient for him. 

It would require a great expanse of writing, 
and it might not be worth the trouble, if one 
were to enter into the interminable debates in 
which are found the mutual recriminations of 



JOHN WINTHROP 103 

these bewildered legislators, and to describe all 
the provisional conventions by which their dis- 
agreements were temporarily composed. The 
most we can do is to survey the main obstacles 
which Winthrop encountered in his efforts to 
govern New England. 

Under ordinary circumstances the historical 
records of any community fall into four divisions, 
according as they deal with autocracy, oligarchy, 
hierarchy, and the final rule of the people. That 
has ever been the course of human events, from 
despotism to the government by a few, from that 
to priestly control, and then a gradual enlargement 
until all have obtained a due share. It is usually 
only by slow stages that the freemen arrive at 
any share in the control of public affairs. It is 
only by winning their rights that the people prove 
their right to possession, and by holding them 
that they establish their ability to hold that which 
they have won. These people had been cast upon 
a foreign shore, without any body of opinion or 
law for the government either of church or of 
state. Accordingly, the government was purely 
a despotism, and that is the only method by which 
a primitive community can be governed. John 
Winthrop was the despot, and it is fortunate that 
it was so, for he was quick to realize the inevit- 



104 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

ableness of the final conclusion. So, in New 
England the stages of advance were short and 
the progress rapid. Governor Winthrop was too 
wise, the magistrates were too feeble, the min- 
isters were too foolish, and the people were too 
resolute, to permit of the issue being long de- 
layed. Indeed, the stages were so short that no 
one system had time to become well organized. 
Neither the Governor, the magistrates, nor the 
ministers ever got beyond a pretension to au- 
thority, and that pretension was continually being 
disputed. Indeed, there were practically only two 
divisions. The Governor, the magistrates, and 
the ministers stood together, and quarrelled only 
incidentally ; the common people were in opposi- 
tion to all three. This is true in the main, but it 
is easy to find instances of the Governor's irrita- 
tion against the magistrates, and against the 
ministers, and those two bodies often called him 
to task. 

As early as 1635 there was a strong feeling in 
the church of Boston against the Governor, and 
the members were earnest with the elders to have 
him called to account. But he took occasion to 
forestall them by stating openly that if he had 
been called to account he should have desired 
first to advise with the elders whether the church 



JOHN WINTHROP 105 

had power to call in question a proceeding of the 
civil court ; and second, he would have consulted 
with the rest of the court whether he might dis- 
cover their concerns in the assembly. Though 
he affirmed " that the elders and some others did 
know already that the church could not enquire 
into the justice and proceedings of the court, he 
would go as far as to further declare his mind 
upon the matter." He showed that if the church 
had such power they must have it from Christ ; 
but Christ disclaimed it in his practice ; and 
though Christ's kingly power was in his church, 
it was not that kingly power whereby he is King 
of Kings and Lord of Lords. Further, he would 
submit that if in pursuing the course of justice, 
though the thing were unjust, yet he was not 
accountable to them. 

A book was brought into court wherein the 
institution of the standing council was pretended 
to be a sinful innovation. The Governor ruled 
to have the contents of the book examined, and if 
there appeared cause, to enquire after the author. 
But the greater part of the court having some 
intimation of the author, and being friendly to 
him, would not consent to the Governor's pro- 
posal. 

The ministers ruled that no member of the court 



106 ESSAYS IX PURITANISM 

ought to be publicly questioned by the church for 
any speech in the court, without the license of the 
court ; " that in all such heresy and errors of any 
church members, as are manifest and dangerous 
to the state, the court may proceed without tarry- 
ing for the church ; but if the opinions be doubt- 
ful they are first to refer them to the church." 
Shortly afterward, Mr. Wheelwright was brought 
up to be questioned for a sermon which seemed to 
tend to sedition, whereupon nearly all the church 
of Boston presented a petition to the court for 
two things ; that as freemen they might be pre- 
sent in cases of judicature, and that the court 
should declare if it might deal in cases of con- 
science in advance of the church. This was taken 
as a groundless and presumptuous act, and was 
rejected with the answer, " that the court had 
never used to proceed but it was openly, but for 
matter of consultation and preparation they might 
and would be private." There was so much heat 
and contention that it was moved that the next 
court should be kept at Cambridge, but that 
resolution came to nothing. 

Upon one occasion the Governor and council 
countermanded an expedition against the Narra- 
gansetts, and some of the people protested. The 
Governor denied the right to protest, but after- 



JOHN WINTHROP 107 

wards lie permitted the expedition to proceed 
" rather to satisfy the people than for any need 
that appeared." The Governor was continually 
taking offence at the interference of the ministers, 
though he admitted their right to proceed in 
what he called a churchlike way. At one general 
court for elections a disturbance resulted upon 
some question of procedure. There was great 
danger of an open tumult, " for those of one side 
grew into fierce speeches, and some laid hands on 
others, but seeing themselves too weak they grew 
quiet." The people of Boston elected deputies 
who were disliked by the court, and the magis- 
trates found means to send them back home alleg- 
ing that two of the freemen had no notice of the 
election, and so they declared the election void. 
The people of Boston next morning returned the 
same deputies, "and the court not finding how 
they might reject them, they were admitted." 
Charles the First had not so much sense. 

Again, the deputies proposed that all affairs of 
the Commonwealth, in the vacation of the general 
court, should be transacted by a commission of 
seven magistrates and three deputies. The magis- 
trates ruled that the court alone should treat of 
those affairs, and the freemen replied that the 
Governor and assistants had no power but what 



108 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

was given them by the general court. The whole 
situation was finally summed up by one of the 
deputies who protested: "Then you will not be 
obeyed." 

The question of the relation of one authority 
to another finally culminated " in a great busi- 
ness which fell out upon a very small occasion," 
commonly known in New England annals as the 
" sow business." It appears that there was a 
stray sow in Boston, which was brought to one 
Captain Kaine ; he had it cried abroad and sev- 
eral came to see it, but none claimed it for nearly 
a year. But Captain Kaine had a sow of his own, 
which, when the time was ripe, he killed in the 
usual way. Then the wife of one Sherman, who 
alleged that she had lost a sow, came to examine 
the stray animal and had to admit that it was not 
hers. Then she resorted to the feminine strata- 
gem of alleging that the sow which had been 
killed probably belonged to her. The matter was 
brought before the elders of the church as a 
cause of offence. Many witnesses were examined 
and Captain Kaine was declared innocent. The 
woman brought the case to another court, where 
the man was again cleared, and was allowed 
twenty pounds against the complainant for slan- 
der. The matter was opened up again in the 



JOHN WINTHROP 109 

Salem court, and the best part of seven days was 
spent in examining witnesses and debating the 
case. But even then no decision could be arrived 
at, for the deputies voted one way and the magis- 
trates the other. The upshot of the matter was 
that in 1644, " upon the motion of the deputies, 
it was ordered that the court should be divided 
in their consultations, the magistrates by them- 
selves and the deputies by themselves ; what the 
one agreed upon they should send to the other, 
and if both agreed then to pass, etc." The founda- 
tion of the government of the United States was 
laid, and it was not laid in blood. That is John 
Winthrop's claim to greatness. Had the Stuarts 
been as wise, they would have been upon the 
throne of England at this day. 

It took the world a long time, it took the min- 
isters of religion a longer time, to learn what was 
their true relation to the state. There have been 
occasions when there was no other body than the 
church which was competent to carry on the gov- 
ernment or the ordinary business of a civilized 
society. That happened when the Roman Em- 
pire went to pieces ; it happened again when the 
New England colonists found themselves in a 
new world, an unorganized mass of humanity. 
It took Europe eighteen centuries to learn the 



110 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

difference between the sword of the flesh and 
the sword of the spirit, and the lesson is not well 
learned yet. New England learned the first rudi- 
ments in eighteen years. The history of those 
eighteen centuries is in large part a record of the 
attempt of the church to perform the duties of gov- 
ernment, and, when that failed, of its insistence 
that it should tell the rulers and then the people 
what they should do, and how they ought to do it. 
It is only within our own time that the church 
has learned that its business is to deal with every 
political event, not in relation to the kingdom of 
this world, but in relation alone to the kingdom 
of God. The first Governor of Massachusetts 
saw in a glass darkly, but what he saw was enough 
for his sane mind, and he laid a foundation of 
knowledge, which is yet the basis of government 
in the United States, and always will be. 

The next difficulty was the need of a body of 
fundamental laws, and Mr. Cotton and other 
ministers were called in to the assistance of the 
magistrates. The best Mr. Cotton could do was 
to present a "model of Moses, his judicials," but 
the magistrates had the wisdom to take them into 
further consideration till the next court. The 
people considered their position unsafe, whilst so 
much power rested in the discretion of the magis- 



JOHN WINTHROP 111 

trates ; and yet, for very weighty reasons, " most 
of the magistrates and some of the elders were 
not very forward in the matter." Their hesi- 
tancy was based upon the soundest consideration 
of policy. In their judgement there was a " want 
of sufficient experience of the nature and con- 
dition of the people, considered in relation to 
the condition of the country and other circum- 
stances." They conceived that the only sound 
laws are those which arise pro rei natura ; the 
fundamental laws of England arose in that way ; 
under their charter they were expressly denied 
the right of making laws repugnant to the laws 
of England, and the laws of England they would 
not have. Therefore they preferred to " avoid 
and protract," and so they would have none. 
They would permit of no set penalties even for 
such offences as lying and swearing ; but their 
reluctance in this case probably arose from the 
determination of the magistrates that their au- 
thority should not be lessened or taken away. 
The deputy governor at this time was Mr. 
Dudley, " a wise and stout gentleman, who would 
not be trodden under foot by any man," but in 
the end even he was compelled to become amen- 
able to the hundred laws, which came to be 
known as the Body of Liberties. 



112 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

The casual reader of New England history 
gains the impression that the church and state 
were identical ; as sometimes happens, the casual 
reader is wrong. The church was one with the 
state only incidentally, and that for a very short 
period. 

The resolution of the people that they would 
have none of clerical control is amply revealed in 
the Congregationalism of the early churches. It 
was the custom of the ministers to meet once a 
fortnight at different houses in turn. Roger Wil- 
liams took exception to this practice, fearing it 
might in time grow into a presbytery, but all were 
clear in their minds that the fear was groundless, 
inasmuch as " no church or person can have power 
over another church." Yet the churches were 
bound by an agreement to assist each other by 
what was called advice, and they had frequent re- 
sort to it. On one occasion there was a difference 
between the church of Charlestown and their 
pastor, Mr. James, who, it appears, was a very 
melancholic man and full of causeless jealousies, 
for which he had been dealt with publicly and 
privately. Chosen men, mostly elders, were sum- 
moned from various churches, and they agreed 
that the melancholic minister should be cast out, 
if he persisted in his course. 



JOHN WINTHROP 113 

Again, it was proposed to begin a new church in 
Dorchester, and the inhabitants desired the appro- 
bation of the other churches, but permission was 
refused, on the allegation that the applicants had 
builded their comfort of salvation upon unsound 
grounds, some upon dreams and ravishes of spirit 
and by fits, others upon the reformation of their 
lives, others upon duties and performances. En- 
quiring further into the nature of this apostasy 
the elders discovered three especial errors : that 
the residents in Dorchester had not come to hate 
sin because it was sinful, but because it was hurt- 
ful ; that they had made use of Christ only to help 
their own imperfections ; that they expected to 
believe through some power of their own. The 
inhabitants of Woburn, " a village at the end of 
Charlestown bounds," had gathered a church and 
were about to ordain a minister. They would not 
permit the elders of any other church to assist, lest 
it might be an occasion of introducing a depend- 
ency of churches, and then a presbytery, so they 
ordained their own minister. The Governor dis- 
closes his own opinion in the remark, that the 
function was performed " not so well and orderly 
as it ought." 

The undercurrent of revolt against hierarchy 
was at all times strong. The money demanded of 



114 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

the people for the support of the church was great 
in proportion to their means, and it was usually 
raised by a direct tax. " which was very offensive 
to some." That we can well believe. One Bris- 
tow, of "VVatertown, " who had his barn burnt," 
AYinthrop observes, as if there was some con- 
nection between the contumaciousness of the man 
and the destruction of his property, being grieved 
because he and others who were not church mem- 
bers were taxed, wrote a book against the imposi- 
tion. That was ever the New England way — to 
write a book. Winthrop admits that the man's 
arguments were weighty ; but he could not be 
permitted to cast reproach upon the elders and 
magistrates, so he was convented before the court. 
With perfect fairness nothing was required of 
him in respect of his arguments, but he was fined 
ten pounds "for some slighting of the court. " 

The casual reader is in possession of another 
misconception — that the greater part of the colo- 
nial activity was consumed in theological con- 
troversy. This current misapprehension of the 
actual state of affairs which prevailed in that 
period of expansion arises from the fact that the 
persons who were mixed up in theology, and con- 
sequently in dissensions, left most painstaking 
records of their proceedings, whilst the trad« 



JOHN WINTHROP 115 

rum, fish, cattle, ships, and negroes were content 
to carry on their enterprise in silence. A reader 
of the jargon in the Wall Street edition of to- 
day's newspaper, or of the proceedings of a Meth- 
odist Conference, a Presbyterian Assembly, an 
Episcopal Synod, or a political convention, would 
get a very definite notion of some things which are 
going on in the world, but he would be astute 
enough not to be led into thinking that the events 
therein recorded concerned the people at large. 

There was, however, so much bickering over re- 
ligious matters, and they yet loom so large, that 
we must endeavour to gain some notion of the pro- 
blems in divinity which agitated the little com- 
munity, and a dull business it will be. Looking at 
the matter broadly, the whole contention turned 
upon the meaning of Sanctification and Justifica- 
tion. To us the question presents no difficulty ; 
but it must be kept in mind that we have the 
Shorter Catechism in our hands, and this sum of 
saving knowledge was not devised for some fifteen 
years after the period of which we are speaking. 
It is hard for a Calvinist to realize that there ever 
was a period in the world's history devoid of the 
blessings inherent in that work. Had those 
seekers after truth but apprehended the simplicity 
of the thing — that justification is an act and 



116 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

sanctification a work, that effectual calling in the 
Catechism is placed textually before both, and 
adoption between them — many a sincere disput- 
ant would have been spared the whipping-post, 
the prison, and the wintry forest. But these things, 
which have been revealed to us, it was not suffered 
unto Winthrop to know. As a result, the com- 
munity was divided into two parties, as distinct as 
Catholics and Protestants in other countries, 
namely, those who were under a covenant of grace 
and those who were under a covenant of works. 
It was Arminianism and Calvinism in one of their 
opposing aspects. 

With the appearance of the Shorter Catechism 
a great calm fell upon the religious world. At 
least one hundred and seven questions were dis- 
posed of; whether settled right or wrong, they 
were settled ; but it required the united skill of 
the theologians of two kingdoms, and Cromwell, 
to keep the peace between them, whilst they were 
engaged upon the task. With these two fundamen- 
tals, Justification and Sanctification, undecided, 
it is easy to understand the minor errors which 
would accompany or flow from that state of un- 
certainty. The conditions in New England grew 
so bad by the year 1(331 that a great diet or 
assembly was held at Cambridge, or Newtown as 



JOHN WINTHROP 117 

it was then called, to which came all the teach- 
ing elders throughout the country, and some who 
were newly arrived out of England. A summary 
was presented of the opinions which were spread 
abroad ; they were eighty in number, " some 
blasphemous, others erroneous, and all unsafe." 
These were condemned by the whole assembly, 
and all present subscribed their names, some 
protesting even whilst they signed. As this body 
of error was revealed in all its grossness, many 
took offence, as if it were a reproach laid upon 
the country, and they insisted that the persons 
should be named who held these errors. Upon 
the refusal of the moderators to bring the errors 
home to individuals, the delegates from Boston 
departed and came no more to the assembly. 

So far as one can make out there were five main 
points in question between Mr. Cotton and Mr. 
Wheelwright on one side, Winthrop and the elders 
taking the opposite side. It is worth while setting 
forth these questions, to illustrate the temper of 
the persons who became excited over such things, 
and thought they understood them. The first was, 
whether persons are united with Christ before the 
stage of active faith ; the second was, of course, 
about the evidence of justification ; the third, that 
the new creature is not the person of the believer, 



r) 



118 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

but a body of saving grace in such an one ; the 
fourth, that God does not justify a man before 
he is effectually called ; and the fifth, that Christ 
and his benefits may be offered to a man who is 
under a covenant of works, " but not in or by 
a covenant of works." 

In handling these questions both parties deliv- 
ered their arguments in writing. These were 
read in the assembly, and afterwards the respect- 
ive answers were given, and a decision taken. 
As soon as these monsters were expelled, the 
assembly determined to drive out the little foxes 
also. The women of Boston were giving trouble 
as early as 1631, and it appears there was a set 
of sixty persons which met every week to listen 
to their leader, " who took upon herself the whole 
exercise in a prophetic way." Her misconduct 
was declared to be disorderly and without rule. 
In this the Governor concurred. There was a 
practice of asking questions after the sermon, 
and under cover of the question occasion would 
be taken to revile the elders, and to reproach the 
ministers and magistrates. This subtle device 
was also utterly condemned. 

There was great hope that this assembly would 
have some good effect in pacifying the dissensions 
about matters of religion, but " it fell out other- 



JOHN WINTHROP 119 

wise ; " for though Mr. Wheelwright and his party- 
had been clearly confounded and confuted, they 
persisted in their opinions ; they were as busy as 
ever in nourishing their principles and drew up 
a petition affirming their truth. The general 
court, which assembled some time after, took 
the matter up. One of the recalcitrants was dis- 
franchised and banished, and word was sent to 
Boston that deputies must be sent who would be 
more amenable to argument ; but the town per- 
sisted in sending the same deputies. The end of 
it was that Mr. Wheelwright was disfranchised 
and banished. He appealed to the King. The 
appeal was not allowed to lie, and he was given 
fourteen days to remove himself out of the juris- 
diction. Nor did the valiant Captain Underhill 
escape, for he with some five or six others was 
disfranchised, and they were removed from their 
public places. The court ordered that all those 
who had subscribed to these doctrines and would 
not acknowledge their fault should be disarmed. 
The church in Boston did not receive this 
chastisement with a good grace, and proceeded 
to call the Governor to account. He forestalled 
them, however, by opening up the question of the 
jurisdiction of the civil court over the church. 
He proved his case by referring to Uzzia, to Asa, 



120 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

who put the prophet in prison, to Solomon, who 
removed Abiathar from the priesthood, and finally 
justified the banishment by the example of Lot, 
and by the sending away of Hagar and Ishmael. 
At Roxbury, also, the church proceeded on simi- 
lar lines, and spent many days in public meetings 
to bring the petitioners to a comprehension of the 
full enormity of their sin, but the best they could 
do was to cast them out of the church. At Wey- 
mouth, however, the elders had better results in 
reconciling the differences between the people. 

The errors cited above were merely the more 
open and notorious, but it appears that there 
were many secret opinions which were scarcely 
less tolerable ; some went so far as to hold that 
there was no inherent righteousness in a child 
of God ; that neither absolute nor conditional 
promises belonged to the Christian ; that the 
Sabbath was but as other days ; that the soul 
was mortal till it was united to Christ : and 
finally that there was no resurrection of the body. 
The town of Providence appears to have been the 
head centre for the propagation of these evils, 
and it was ordered that if any of the residents 
were found within the jurisdiction of Boston, 
they should be sent home and charged to come 
there no more under pain of imprisonment. 



JOHN WINTHROP 121 

It would be tedious to enumerate all the ques- 
tions which agitated the community ; that faith 
is a cause of justification ; that the letter of the 
Scripture holds forth a covenant of works, and 
its spirit a covenant of grace ; that a man might 
have special communion with Jesus Christ and 
yet be damned. It would be more tedious still 
to enumerate all the attempts that were made to 
solve the doubts. To Mr. Cotton, sixteen points 
were presented in writing, and all business of 
the court was put off for three weeks, that 
they might bring matters to an issue. Looking 
at the matter narrowly, these incidents were 
merely church quarrels, such as happen even yet 
in every Protestant community, and never gain 
a wider currency than in tea-table talk or village 
scandal. In the early days they were the subject 
matter of history, because the church was inci- 
dentally the state. The place of these contentions 
is now taken by the equally trivial matters which 
transpire in the corridors of legislative halls, or 
in the secret meetings of small politicians. The 
indwelling of the Holy Ghost is as profitable a 
subject of discussion as many of the political 
theories which are now agitating the public mind. 

We should not fail to take note of another of 
Winthrop's main difficulties, which was the men- 



122 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

tal disorderliness of the people, at times amount- 
ing to actual hysteria. Strong emotion acting upon 
a weak mind always produces disorder. In this 
case it was the religious emotion. It fell with full 
force, and even normal minds were affected by it. 
The mind of the Governor himself was influenced 
by it, but its worst effects were witnessed in the 
case of women and children. A woman of the 
Boston Congregation, having been in much 
trouble of mind about her spiritual state, at length 
grew into bitter desperation ; she could endure the 
uncertainty no longer, and decided to set the 
matter for ever at rest ; so one day she took her 
infant child and threw it into a well, saying now 
she was sure she would be damned. It is always 
a mark of a disordered mind in a woman, when 
she manifests excessive concern about her own 
soul, or any concern whatever about the souls of 
persons outside of her own household. Of course, 
very few women went to the extreme of throwing 
their children into wells, but sixty women of Bos- 
ton used to meet together every week to M resolve 
questions of doctrine.'' 

At Providence also, " the devil was not idle : 
men's wives claimed liberty to go to all religious 
meetings, though never so often." A meeting was 
organized to censure a domestic tyrant named 



JOHN WINTHROP 123 

Udrin, and some were of opinion "that if he 
would not suffer his wife to have her liberty, the 
church should dispose her to one who would use 
her better." One Greene, who spoke out of the 
fulness of his experience, for he had married a 
woman " whose husband was then living, and no 
divorce," gave testimony to a phenomenon with 
which we are not entirely unfamiliar, "that if 
they should restrain their wives, all the women 
in the country would cry out against them." The 
devil — that was Winthrop's interpretation of 
the spirit which was at work — continued to dis- 
turb the peace through his agent, the wife of a 
Salem man named Oliver. As an indication of 
her obstinacy of nature, Winthrop notes that 
whilst in England she would not bow her knee 
even at the name of Jesus. 

This woman stood up in the church on Sacra- 
ment Day and demanded the sacred elements, 
" and would not forbear before Mr. Endicott did 
threaten to send the constable to put her forth." 
This went on for five years, and in the end the 
woman was adjudged to be whipped, which was 
certainly an extreme measure. 

This abnormal excitability has not yet dis- 
appeared from the expanded New England com- 
munity now known as the United States, and 



124 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

some have thought that they have witnessed its 
manifestations in many other quarters than those 
in which women dwell. It does not require a very 
acute or trained observer to detect the operations 
of that spirit in the church, in the colleges, in 
schools and in homes, in the legislatures, in the 
newspapers and in the political assemblies, in the 
streets, in offices, and at the lunch counter. It is 
easily traceable from the beginning, at times con- 
tracted and insignificant, and again broadening 
out till the normal structure of society was almost 
entirely replaced by the horrid growth. It was 
seen at its worst during the period of the witch- 
craft delusion, to a less extent during the 
Edwardean revivals and in the early forties, and 
again at the outbreak of the Spanish War and 
through the whole course of the Philippine opera- 
tions. It would not be hard either to trace its 
effect upon the lives of individuals, even down to 
the time of Abraham Lincoln and Henry Ward 
Beecher. One of them it slew, and the other it 
almost brought to the ground. Unfortunately, in 
Beecher's time there was no Governor Winthrop 
in Plymouth church, with whip and cleft stick. 

The head and front of this revolt of the women 
was Mrs. Hutchinson, M a woman of ready wit and 
bold spirit," and she was allied with a party 






JOHN WINTHROP 125 

which almost rent the community in twain, by- 
insisting that the person of the Holy Ghost dwells 
in a justified person. To the disgust of the 
Governor, meetings and conferences had to be 
held. Mrs. Hutchinson at first appears to have 
had her own way, though she did make the 
unwilling reservation that the indwelling of the 
Holy Ghost might not amount to a personal union. 
The heresy spread ; more meetings were held, and 
the matter was concluded by a conference, "in 
which there appeared some bitterness of speech." 
As the speech stands before us, the bitterness is 
apparent, but the sense is not, though the last 
sentence of the reported utterance contains 126 
words and three sets of brackets. But the temper 
of the magistrates was up. Mrs. Hutchinson was 
arraigned upon the definite charge of alleging 
that none of the ministers, save Mr. Cotton, were 
preaching a covenant of free grace. After "many 
speeches to and fro, she could contain herself no 
longer, but gave vent to revelations," portending 
evil to the young community. That was her real 
offence, and she too was banished; but because 
it was the winter time, they committed her to 
a private house, with permission only for her own 
friends and the elders to visit her. Though the 
opinions which she entertained do not appear very 



126 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

dangerous to us, they may have appeared so to 
the persons who understood those things. 

In all these religious strivings we are apt to 
lose sight of the actual business that was being 
done in New England ; but, fortunately, we are not 
left without information of the attitude of the 
common people towards the sea of strife in which 
the politico-theologians were involved. The people 
at large are never much concerned about anything 
else than that out of which their livelihood comes. 

The movement of population was most remark- 
able. Within six weeks in the year 1635, fourteen 
ships arrived with "store of passengers and 
cattle ; " sloops, shallops, and small boats of all 
kinds were passing from island to island, with 
mares, heifers, goats, and sheep ; traders were 
coming to port with beaver skins, corn and hemp, 
sugar, strong waters, tobacco, and other com- 
modities ; whole communities, men, women, and 
children, swine and cattle, were migrating in all 
directions to find new places in which they might 
" sit down." Ships were built to prosecute the 
whale and herring fishery ; trade was opened with 
neighbouring colonies and witli Virginia, the 
West Indies, and the ports of Spain. Wars were 
prosecuted against the Indians, against one or 
other of the French factions which claimed inter- 



JOHN WINTHROP 127 

est about the Bay of Fundy, and provision was 
made against attack by the Dutch, the Spaniards, 
or England herself. 

Besides all this, there were continual adven- 
tures by sea and by land undertaken by adven- 
turous soldiers, which betray anything else than 
the traditional temper of religious sectaries. 
Thomas Wanerton was " a stout man and had 
been a soldier, but for many years he had lived 
very wickedly in whoredom, drunkenness, and 
quarrelling ; he had of late come under some ter- 
rors and motions of the spirit by means of the 
preaching of the word," but he succeeded in 
shaking them off, and with twenty men undertook 
an attack upon Penobscot, which was held by 
D'Aulnay in opposition to La Tour. It does not 
matter what the issue of the attack was, save that 
" there was a knocking at the door with swords 
and pistols ready, and a great deal of shooting 
backwards and forwards." 

Two new ships, the one of 250 tons, built at 
Cambridge, the other of 200 tons, built in Boston, 
set sail for the Canaries on the same day, laden 
with pipe-staves and fish. Upon another day five 
ships sailed from Boston, three of them built in 
that port, two of which were of 300 tons burthen. 
The following day a ship arrived from Teneriffe 



128 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

with a freight of wine, pitch, sugar, and spices, 
and a ketch of 30 tons, bought from the French, 
which was ready to sail for Trinidad, blew up in 
the harbour. 

The first ship built in Boston was the Trial, 
of 160 tons, Thomas Graves, master, M an able 
and a godly man." This small craft was contin- 
ually going and coming to Bilboa with fish ; 
thence to Malaga; back to Boston with wine, 
fruit, oil, iron, and wool ; then to trade with La 
Tour, and so along the eastern coast towards 
Canada. The launching of this ship was attended 
with religious services, and Mr. Cotton was in- 
vited to discourse before the " divers godly sea- 
men " who formed the crew. Their godliness did 
not interfere with their enterprise, for they sailed 
to Fayal, where they found an "extraordinary 
good market " for their stores and fish ; there 
they took on board wine and sugar for the West 
Indies, which they exchanged for cotton and 
tobacco in the port of Saint Peter's. During their 
stay they engaged in an enterprise of salvage, ami 
by the help of a diving-tub took up forty guns, 
anchors, and cables ; so with some gold and sil- 
ver, which they got by trade, they sailed away 
for Boston, and through the Lord's UesSU 
Winthrop alleges, "they made a good voyage. 



JOHN WINTHROP 129 

which did much encourage the merchants, and 
made wine and sugar and cotton very plentiful 
and cheap in the country." 

Winthrop's journal bears upon nearly every 
page evidence of the extraordinary vitality and 
activity of the young community. Ships were sail- 
ing from Salem and Providence to all ports — 
to the Dry Tortugas, with " salt fish and strong 
liquors, which are the only commodities for those 
parts " — and bringing back cotton, tobacco, and 
negroes in exchange. Unless these seventeenth 
century seamen are sadly belied, they engaged in 
other enterprises of more questionable morality 
than the slave trade. It would be as reasonable 
to regard the New England harbours as nests 
of pirates as of religious fanatics, though of course 
a man may be a religious fanatic and a pirate too. 

I shall relate but one instance to illustrate the 
temper of the men who formed the front of the 
community, and appeal to any reasonable person 
to say if he thinks that the relation of sanctifica- 
tion to justification was the dominant concern of 
their lives. " Here arrived one Mr. Carman, mas- 
ter of the ship called [name omitted], of 180 tons. 
He went from New Haven in lOber last, laden 
with clap-boards for the Canaries, being earnestly 
commended to the Lord's protection by the church 



130 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

there. At the Island of Palma he was set upon 
by a Turkish pirate of 300 tons and 26 pieces of 
ordnance and 200 men ; he fought with her for 
three hours, having but twenty men and but 
7 pieces of ordnance that he could use, and his 
muskets were unserviceable with rust. The Turk 
lay across his hawse, so as he was forced to shoot 
through his own hoodings, and by these shot 
killed many Turks ; then the Turk lay by his side 
and boarded him with near 100 men and cut all 
the ropes, etc., but his shot having killed the cap- 
tain of the Turkish ship and broken his tiller, the 
Turk took in his own ensign and fell off from him, 
but in such haste as he left about 50 of his men 
aboard ; then the master and some of his men came 
up and fought with those 50, hand to hand, and 
slew so many of them as the rest leaped overboard. 
The master had many wounds on his head and 
body and divers of his men were wounded, yet but 
one slain, so with much difficulty he got to the 
island (being in view thereof), where he was very 
courteously entertained and supplied with what- 
soever he wanted." 

The passengers coming from England were con- 
tinually bringing money, and so long as that lasted 
trade prospered. They had left England because 
the posture of affairs in the homeland did not suit 



JOHN WINTHROP 131 

them ; and when at length tidings came that the 
Scots had entered England, that a parliament was 
to be called, and there was a hope of a thorough 
reformation, many began to think of returning 
home ; some did return home, and certainly the 
tide of immigration ceased. At the same time 
there was a failure of the crops ; Virginia was 
offering strong inducements to colonists and the 
most tempting reports were being received from 
the West Indies. The New England colony was 
on the verge of ruin. This was Winthrop's hour. 
Ships no longer arrived with money and commod- 
ities in exchange for the products of the colony. 
The quick market and good profits were at an end. 
Money had disappeared, as it has a habit of doing 
in hard times. The price of cattle fell to one half, 
to a third, to a fourth. Corn would buy nothing ; 
merchants would sell no wares but for ready 
money, and prices of foreign goods were rising. 
The country was on the verge of bankruptcy ; it 
could not pay its obligations abroad. 

When these difficulties began to be felt the 
magistrates resorted to the usual expedients. 
They made an order that a musket bullet should 
pass for a farthing ; that corn should pass at 
a specified rate ; that carpenters should work 
for a certain wage. The ministers applied their 



w 



132 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

wisdom to the situation. Mr. Cotton on the next 
lecture day, laid it down as a false principle that 
a man may sell as dear and buy as cheap as he can ; 
if he lose by casualty at sea in some of his com- 
modities, that he may raise the price of the rest ; 
that he may sell as he bought, though he pay too 
dear and though the price of the commodity be 
fallen in the mean time ; that as a man may take 
the advantage of his own skill or ability, so he may 
of another's ignorance or necessity. Thereupon 
the minister laid down the true rules for trading : 
that a man may not sell above the current prices ; 
when a man loses in his commodity for want of 
skill, he must look to it as his own fault or cross, 
and must not lay it upon another ; when a man 
loses by calamity at sea, it is a loss cast upon 
himself by Providence, and he may not ease him- 
self of it by casting it upon another. This was 
as wise as most theories upon economics, but the 
result was the same : the country was still closer 
to ruin. The people went so far as to prosecute 
the traders, amongst whom was that Kaine who 
figured so largely in the " sow business." 

This man was made the object of peculiar ani- 
mosity, because M he had been an ancient professor 
of the gospel, a man of eminent parts, wealthy, 
and having but one child, having come over for 



JOHN WINTHROP 133 

conscience' sake and for the advancement of the 
gospel ; " this added aggravation to his sin in the 
judgement of all men of understanding ; yet most 
of the magistrates acknowledged clearly enough 
that the deputies had gone too far ; because there 
was no law in force to limit or direct men to 
appoint a profit in their trade; because of the 
common practice in all countries for men to make 
use of advantages for raising prices ; because a 
certain rule could not be found out for an equal 
rate between buyer and seller. There is wisdom 
in that judgement. 

Governor Winthrop took the matter in hand 
and discovered the true and only device for the 
prosperity of a nation or an individual — that is, 
self-dependence. He decided to build ships. He 
allowed the artisans to go where they did best, 
" employing persuasion alone in a voluntary 
way." He set the people to work curing fish, 
sawing clap-boards and planks, sowing hemp and 
flax, making their own cotton from materials 
obtained by exchange in the West Indies, breed- 
ing their own cattle, and practising economy. 
Through the intervention of friends in England, 
he had all goods proceeding to and from the col- 
ony declared free ; by another ruling all stocks 
employed in fishing were relieved from any pub- 



, 1 1 



134 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

lie charge for a period of seven years. Finally 
he sent commissioners to England to explain to 
their creditors the true state of affairs, and the 
colony was saved. 

The tendency of colonists is to become entirely 
absorbed in their own local affairs. It was not 
so in New England. From their first landing they 
became engaged in high politics of far-reaching 
effects ; and by the wisdom, insight, and modera- 
tion of their first Governor, they laid a founda- 
tion in the world's history which has never been 
removed. Their conduct towards Lord Sey, and 
towards the Commissioners who arrived, or whose 
coming was threatened from England, was marked 
by consummate wisdom. In one case they got 
out of their difficulties by proving that " the com- 
mission itself stayed at the seal for not paying 
the fees." The King must not be defrauded. 
This scrupulosity for the King's authority stood 
them in good stead on many occasions, and for 
men so well versed in the scriptures of the Old 
Testament it was easy to find a suitable answer 
to the most embarrassing demands. When they 
were in doubt as to whom they should assist. La 
Tour or D'Aulnay, in the struggle for supremacy 
in the French possessions, they took time to dis- 
cuss the line of conduct which was pursued under 






JOHN WINTHROP 135 

similar circumstances by Jehosheba, Ahab, Josiah 
and Amazia. By the time they had solved their 
doubts all necessity for action had passed away. 
In our own day we have seen the admirable re- 
sults of this subtle method of diplomacy. 

When trouble arose with the Dutch of New 
Netherland, and an ultimatum was received, 
either the day was too wet to consider it, or the 
magistrates were not at home, or the matter 
would have to be referred to a general court; 
so, meanwhile, the Governor would write in his 
own name, giving his own private views, being 
compelled thereto by the unfortunate circum- 
stances of the case, and "his answer for the 
present must be rather a declaration of his own 
conceptions, than the determination of their 
chief est authority, from which they would receive 
further answer in time convenient." In the mean 
time the Governor would declare his grief over 
the difficulties between them, which might be 
composed by arbiters in England, or Holland, or 
elsewhere ; the difference was so small that it 
was not worth considering in view of their past 
amity and correspondence, nor worthy to cause a 
breach between two peoples so nearly related and 
in possession of the Protestant religion ; and if 
the matter should be decided against the Dutch, 



136 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

as it probably would be, they, being a God-fear- 
ing people, would see the wisdom of it and refrain 
from following in an unrighteous course. Also, 
but always in the mean time, the Governor would 
take occasion to remind the Dutch of a claim for 
forty pounds which a godly seaman of Piscat had 
against them for having fired upon him and com- 
pelled him to weigh anchor, and that upon the 
Lord's Day. There is only one person known to 
modern history, and that a Dutchman, who could 
frame a suitable rejoinder to such a letter as 
that. 

If Governor Winthrop were known to us merely 
as the leader of that colony which overshadowed 
all New England, as the only statesman who ever 
granted, without prejudice, constitutional govern- 
ment to a people whom he was entitled to rule, and 
did rule until the time came, with justice and 
humanity and wisdom, it would be easy to mark 
his proper place in history. But he had to descend 
to the smallest affairs of village life and perform 
duties which are usually left to the curate or 
minister, the schoolmaster, the constable, or the 
meanest police magistrate. To many persons he is 
known only by his performance of these trivial 
functions. 

Being without a body of laws, without any 



JOHN WINTHROP 137 

defined responsibility, or any real notion of his 
rights and privileges in relation to the other ele- 
ments in the community, "Winthrop was compelled 
by necessity to adjudge specifically every manner 
of offence, from excessive adornment of the per- 
son, the intemperate use of alcohol and tobacco, 
desertion from service, seditious speeches in pri- 
vate and public, to the weightier matter of English 
jealousy and Dutch intrigue. It is quite true that 
his estimation of the relative heinousness of crime 
was at variance with our notions of jurisprudence, 
and that his judgements were drawn aside by his 
religious nature and his abhorrence of sin. For 
example, he had before him two men who had 
committed an offence arising out of a mutual 
though perverted regard for each other. The 
animus of the prosecution seems to have been 
directed less against the crime itself than against 
the fact that it had been committed " on the Lord's 
Day, and that in time of public service." A ser- 
vant, "a very profane fellow given to cursing, 
etc., did use to go out of the assembly upon the 
Lord's Day to rob his master ; " being threatened 
with an appearance before the magistrates, he was 
far-sighted enough to go and hang himself. 

Taking into account the barbarity of the Eng- 
lish law, in which Winthrop had been trained, the 



138 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

worst of the punishments which he inflicted were 
humane, merciful, and reasonable, and usually 
were awarded with good sense. One godly minis- 
ter, for example, upon conscience of his oath and 
care of the commonweal, discovered to the magis- 
trates some seditious speeches of his own son, de- 
livered to himself in private. The magistrates did 
not think it proper to take notice of the charge, 
being loath to have the father come out in public 
as the accuser of his son, so they had resort to the 
rather indirect method of seeking out other and 
more easily proven charges against the boy. In- 
deed, Winthrop was often brought to task for his 
leniency, and was convinced " that it was so." He 
promised "that he would endeavour, by God's 
assistance, to take a more strict course, whereupon 
there was renewal of love " between him and his 
advisers. 

The domestic servants had to be dealt with, for 
they were a source of annoyance then as now. 
One troublesome fellow was merely " put in mind 
of hell, but he made no amendment, and shortly 
suffered a manifest judgement of God, by being 
drowned." In these days, it would appear as if 
the loss of a servant were a judgement which was 
manifest upon the master. At another court " a 
young fellow was whipped for soliciting an Indian 



JOHN WINTHROP 139 

squaw to incontinency ; she and her husband were 
present at the execution, and professed themselves 
to be well satisfied." The following year, a trader 
in Watertown was convicted for selling a pistol 
to an Indian ; he was whipped and branded on the 
cheek. The persons who were whipped were 
almost invariably menials, and whipping was a 
common method of remonstrance against their 
misdoings in many well-ordered families. It ill 
becomes us to set up our opinion upon the manage- 
ment of servants, seeing the pass to which we our- 
selves have been brought by the abandonment of 
that salutary practice. 

Justice, indeed, was often tempered by worldly 
wisdom. Captain John Stone, though a most 
troublesome individual, was a stout soldier. He 
carried himself dissolutely and was finally taken 
in adultery; his punishment was a fine, which 
was not levied, and the woman was bound to her 
good behaviour. At the same time a luckless in- 
dividual, named Cole, was condemned to wear a 
red D about his neck for the unaggravated offence 
of drunkenness. The practice of adultery was one 
which gave great trouble to the magistrates, and 
from Winthrop's account it would appear as if 
Samuel Johnson's conclusion had some foundation 
in fact, that the disorder is as common amongst 



140 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

farmers as amongst noblemen. In Captain Under- 
bill's case it was looked upon as a frailty ; in tbe 
case of tbree otber persons wbo were tben in 
prison, a point of legal niceness arose as to tbe 
constitutionality of tbe scriptural practice. How- 
ever, " it was thought safest that they should be 
whipped and banished," probably a satisfactory 
issue to the case. The misconduct of Stephen 
Batcheller was unmistakeably heinous, for he was 
pastor of the church at Hampton ; he had suffered 
much at the bands of the bishops in England ; he 
was about eighty } r ears of age, and " had a lusty 
comely woman to his wife, yet he did solicit the 
chastity of his neighbour's wife, who acquainted 
her husband therewith." The whole case is very 
painful. The pastor of Dover also fell into a 
similar unfortunate situation, but it is always 
difficult to arrive at the facts of an affair between 
the pastor and a widow of his flock. The case of 
James Britton and Mary Latham, both of whom 
suffered death, is well known. Their conduct 
certainly was shameless. 

This Captain Underbill was a turbulent per- 
son. He was continually under censure for his un- 
seemliness of conduct, his looseness of behaviour, 
and incautious carriage, and as often repenting 
and promising amendment : " yet all his con- 



JOHN WINTHROP 141 

fessions were mixed with excuses and extenua- 
tions, and he was cast out of the church ; whilst 
he remained in Boston he was very much dejected, 
but being gone home again, he soon recovered 
his spirits and gave not that proof of a broken 
heart as was hoped for." He must have been 
a proper rake indeed, for we find him " charged 
by a godly young woman to have solicited her 
chastity under pretence of Christian love ; " yet 
he was elected Governor of Piscat, and committed 
one of his fellow magistrates to prison for declar- 
ing that he would not sit with an adulterer. In 
the end, however, by the blessing of God upon 
the excommunication, the captain came before 
the church, " in his worst clothes, being accus- 
tomed to take great pride in his bravery and 
neatness, without a band, in a foul linen cap 
pulled close to his eyes, and standing on a bench 
he did with abundance of tears lay open his 
wicked course." If the remainder of his oration 
is correctly reported, he must have been a pro- 
found theologian, for Winthrop commends his 
doctrine of sin, " save for his blubbering, etc." 
It is questionable if his amendment was sincere, 
for we come upon his tracks for years afterwards 
in strange places for a man of a humble and con- 
trite spirit. 



142 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

I have said that the colonists were cast up in 
a new world, without laws or traditions for regu- 
lating the affairs of church, state, or society at 
large, and contrary to belief there was a consider- 
able number of vicious persons who required the 
strongest measures to compel them to conform to 
the ordinary usages of civilized men. It is the 
pressure of public opinion alone which prevents 
the average man from adopting the habits of 
a beast. We all know what went on in the days 
of the early adventurers to Canada, when it was 
looked upon as a noble act of self-abnegation for 
a trader to possess only one wife in each village. 
We also know the means which were required in 
the Western mining communities, not so very 
long ago either, to restrain the more unsocial 
vices. The authorities in New England had the 
same difficulties to face. There was amongst the 
colonists a large number of male house-servants, 
a class which has been in possession of special 
vices from the time of Pliny until now. Gov- 
ernor Winthrop had no hesitation in referring 
to their habits ; he had as little hesitation in 
applying the correction, the rope and the whip, 
two incitements to decency, which are by no means 
to be despised. 

The vice of drunkenness was not common, and 



JOHN WINTHROP 143 

as such was not dealt with, save that a general 
court put itself on record by making an order to 
abolish the custom of drinking healths, on the 
ground that it was a thing of no good use, that 
* it was an inducement to drunkenness, and occa- 
sion of quarrelling and bloodshed, that it occa- 
sioned much waste of wine and beer, that it was 
troublesome to many, especially to masters and 
mistresses of feasts, who were forced to drink 
more often than they would. 

There were, of course, many instances of drink 
being associated with disorders. A troublesome 
business arose in Boston over its effects. A ship 
arrived from Portugal and left behind two Eng- 
lishmen. According to the inalienable right of 
his race, one of them became " proper drunk," 
and was carried to his lodging. The constable, 
"a godly man and zealous against such disor- 
ders," took him from his bed and placed him in 
the stocks. A Frenchman of the entourage of La 
Tour, who was then in the town, was passing that 
way and released the prisoner. The constable 
sought out the Frenchman, and " would needs 
carry him to the stocks," but he refused and drew 
his sword, at the same time protesting his willing- 
ness to go to prison, but not to submit to the 
indignity of public exposure. He was disarmed, 



144 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

and with a curious reversal of procedure, he was 
first set in the stocks, then as if to meet his for- 
eign scruples, he was taken to prison, and finally 
was brought before La Tour. The magistrates 
" admonished the constable in private for having 
without warrant or authority taken a man out of 
his bed, and in the second place for not setting 
a hook upon the stocks." With their usual com- 
mon sense, they would lay nothing to his charge 
before the assembly, but Winthrop in his private 
journal expresses the necessity of upholding the 
authority of the magistrates, and refers bitterly 
to these " last fruits of ignorant and misguided 
zeal." The sailors who came into those ports 
would appear to have behaved in accordance with 
the habits of their time and the tradition of their 
race, and Winthrop found a melancholy satisfac- 
tion in recording the disasters by which they 
were overtaken. But as nearly all the mariners 
of that time came to an untimely end, it does not 
appear that vengeance followed them specifically 
for the deeds of drunkenness, quarrelling, and 
evil speaking which are recorded against them. 

The thing that seems intolerable to us in Win- 
throp's conduct is his punishment of men and 
women for their opinions. The Governor of New 
England was quite frank about the matter. He 



JOHN WINTHROP 145 

thought it entirely proper that if a person uttered 
opinions which were dangerous to the community 
he should be punished for it. In this the Governor 
was right : " the government must be carried on." 
But the punishments inflicted for political offences 
were not numerous — perhaps a dozen in the twenty 
years of Winthrop's influence. Henry Lincoln was 
whipped and banished for writing letters to Eng- 
land. We do not know what he wrote ; but even 
if he wrote only the truth, he may have deserved 
what he got. It is not an inalienable right of a 
citizen always to tell the truth about his country 
to his country's enemies, and England as a whole 
was an enemy to the colony at that time. Major 
Andre* was not allowed the opportunity of " writ- 
ing letters into England." In New England, for 
the time being, the church and state and court 
were united into a trinity in which the personality 
of each could not be distinguished, so rebellion 
against one was an attack upon all three. In 
these days, one who speaks against the church 
may be a harmless fool or a sincere reformer, 
neither of whom should be interfered with ; one 
who rails against the court is liable to find him- 
self in gaol, and it does not require a traitor's 
ghost to come back to tell us what will happen to 
those who plot against their country. 



14G ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

As late as the second session of the Fifty- 
Seventh Congress of the United States, held in 
the present century, which is yet comparatively 
young, an enactment was made commencing in 
these terms : " No person who disbelieves in." It 
does not matter for our argument what is the sub- 
ject of belief or disbelief ; in this case it is disbelief 
in all organized government, or affiliation with 
any organization entertaining or teaching such 
disbelief. The legislators of Massachusetts are 
separated from the legislators of the United States 
by the distance and events of three hundred years. 
Their attitude toward this question of belief is 
identical. The court of Massachusetts under Win- 
throp punished men and women by banishment 
and by whipping, not for the contrariety of their 
opinions, but because their speech and conduct 
made government difficult, and in the judgement 
of the magistrates tended to make it impossible. 

Of course, no one would think of going to the 
Fifty-Seventh Congress as the ultimate lair of 
political wisdom. It is not pretended that their 
enactment was abstractly right ; but government 
has never yet been carried on, and never will be 
carried on, by an adherence to abstract principles, 
even if those principles could be discovered. The 
law in question will not be enforced, because the 



JOHN WINTHROP 147 

common sense and conscience of the people will 
not permit it. In the early days the people had 
less experience and more conscience, a phenome- 
non which is common enough, and they did en- 
force similar laws. But they laid a foundation of 
government upon obedience and order, so that 
their descendants can afford to neglect opinions 
which seem for the time being to be contrary to 
common sense, until it is fully proven that they 
are not so. Then we shall have sense enough to 
adopt them. Carlyle was wrong. The folly of the 
fools is more precious than the wisdom of the 
doctrinaires, for purposes of government. 

The fascination which one finds in a study of 
the men and events of early New England is akin 
to that which a naturalist feels in watching the 
growth of an organism in vitro : it is so small, so 
simple, and the growth is so rapid. Every element 
in a national life is seen in the colony, but all is 
in miniature. Questions of free trade, of currency, 
of exports and imports, of the inter-relations of 
governor, magistrates, deputies, and voters, of the 
balance between church and state, are all working 
themselves out to their inevitable conclusions ; and 
above all there is the spectacle of men and women 
leading a life of intense activity, as if one were 
observing a swarm of bees at work within a hive 



148 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

of glass, and over this activity a wisely guiding 
mind. 

The same problems which still perplex eighty 
millions of people perplexed that little colony, and 
it is easy to discover the revelation which they 
made of themselves in dealing with those pro- 
blems. The stage was so small, the actors so few 
and their parts so distinct, if one may employ 
a profane simile in connection with so serious a 
subject, that we have no difficulty in comprehend- 
ing the slightest detail of the little national life, 
and the finest characteristics of its governor. 

Governor Winthrop himself was tender of con- 
science, and those whom he had to govern were ten- 
der of conscience, too ; that is, he disliked doing 
what he thought was wrong ; and his people also dis- 
liked doing what they thought was wrong. There 
are always opposing views of right, and that is 
what makes government difficult in a free country. 
Government is always easy when one party is will- 
ing to submit to what it believes to be wrong, 
without bothering about it. That is what makes 
government easy in the United States to-day. A 
man may ease his conscience by the subterfuge 
that his whole duty is performed in submitting to 
the law, even if he think that law is wrong ; but 
in New England that poor excuse was denied be- 



JOHN WINTHROP 149 

cause there was no law. The conscience had free 
play. 

What Winthrop undertook to do he failed in 
doing. He demonstrated by his failure that an 
identity of church and state is intolerable to free 
men, and that the domain of religion lies entirely 
beyond the reach of human authority. Cromwell, 
by his failure, made the same demonstration in 
England, but he died before he had found a bet- 
ter way. Every one admits that it is possible to 
attain to a union of the spirit of man with the 
spirit of God, to a newness of life, to a fresh con- 
ception of the heinousness of sin, and to a know- 
ledge or assurance that evil can be transformed 
into good. No one now pretends to say how that 
state of affairs comes about — whether it has its 
origin in some movement of the will of God from 
all eternity, or whether the act of volition may be 
initiated in the man himself — but all agree that 
it is arrived at only by great strivings of spirit, 
and not by human authority. It is in virtue of 
this struggle after perfection alone that John 
Winthrop and those exiled Puritans attained to 
greatness. 



ra 

MARGARET FULLER 



MARGARET FULLER 

The literary history of the United States is full 
of enigmas, which are unsolved to this day, be- 
cause we have no contemporary criticism of any 
value to guide us. All just appreciation is lost 
in the adulation of friends and the calumny of 
enemies. There has always been a lack of that 
balanced judgement, which gives us so accurate 
a notion of French and English writers of a time 
even much anterior to that of which we are about 
to speak. George Sand we know, George Eliot 
we know, but what manner of person was Mar- 
garet Fuller ? 

The case is the more difficult, inasmuch as it 
concerns a woman. A man can know very little 
about a woman, even under circumstances the 
most favourable for procuring knowledge. Lord 
Byron admitted that much ; and he is generally 
accredited with diligence in pursuing all paths 
which might lead to information, and employing 
every means that might minister to his curiosity. 

One who writes anything worth reading is 
bound to find dissenters, but the worst foes of 



154 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

a literary person are those of his own household. 
All that is required for the hasty condemnation 
of any one is the publication of everything which 
is publicly known, told secretly, or imperfectly 
remembered. We know how the Carlyles and 
Kuskins suffered ; but Margaret Fuller suffered 
worst of all, because her friends were so highly 
endowed with folly. Malice is powerless to bring 
down a reputation ; silliness will lay it in the dust. 

This "gifted woman" — it is well, at once, to 
commence using the epithets of her biographers — 
save for a little published criticism which now 
seems obvious enough, left not behind her the 
expression of a single thought which is essentially 
worth remembering. Yet her friends have aspired 
to set her in a place above Elizabeth Barrett 
Browning, above the two Georges, Sand and 
Eliot ; they have brought her lower than Mary 
Baker Eddy. After the manner of all foolish dis- 
ciples, they have so distorted the object of their 
worship that it is now difficult to see her as she 
was. That is why the personality of Margaret 
Fuller is an enigma. 

There are two methods of writing biography, 
the exhaustive and selective. In the one case, 
everything that is known or surmised is reported 
with ^discriminating fidelity ; in the other, the 



MARGARET FULLER 155 

facts, surmises, and probabilities are taken as a 
whole and duly considered. The writer himself 
forms an image and presents it as a true epitome, 
after the manner of any artist. At first sight it 
would appear that if we had all contemporary 
knowledge of individuals, we should know them as 
they are ; but this is not so. We have to create 
the image for ourselves, and it will be coloured 
by the insistence which we place upon this fact 
or upon that. But, after all, the manifestations of 
the individual life are too elusive to be caught 
and transmitted in any such rough fashion, even 
if we admit the utmost good faith on the part of 
the reporters ; and that is an admission which we 
are not always justified in making. 

Margaret Fuller's life has been treated in this 
exhaustive way. The hysterical vagaries of her 
childhood, the follies of her over-mature youth, 
the absurdness of her young womanhood, are all 
preserved to us by writers little less hysterical 
and quite as absurd as herself. This mass of 
pseudo-information is contained in five bulky vol- 
umes of printed and written material, in volumes 
of letters to and from notable persons of the 
time, in diaries, numerous and minute, and in 
reminiscences by every one who might remember 
anything. These reminiscences, however, were 



156 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

written for the most part at a time when their 
authors' memories had failed, and they spent a 
great deal of labour in remembering very unim- 
portant things. 

This raw material has been handled over and 
over again : in earlier days by James Freeman 
Clarke, William Henry Channing — cousin of 
one William Ellery and nephew of the other. It 
may be necessary to remind this generation that 
Clarke was founder of the Church of the Disciples 
at Boston in 1841, and pastor of the flock till his 
death ; that Channing was close to the formula- 
tors of American Unitarianism, and allied with 
the Fuller family, his cousin Ellery having mar- 
ried Ellen, the sister of Margaret. Neither was 
Emerson himself wholly free from blame. At a 
later date, Julia Ward Howe, herself an important 
personage in New England, became Miss Fuller's 
formal biographer, and still later, Mr. Higginson, 
whose appreciation is in some degree tempered 
by a just criticism. 

Two or three illustrations will serve to show 
what kind of doctrine we are likely to expect 
from these biographers. In striving for an ex- 
planation of Miss Fuller's authority, Mrs. Howe 
never got beyond asking the question : M What 
imperial power had this self-poised soul, which 



MARGARET FULLER 157 

could lead in its train the brightest and purest 
intelligences, and bind the sweet influence of 
starry souls in the garland of its happy bowers ? " 
The present writer does not know. Again, when 
Miss Fuller was passing through the stage com- 
mon to all young ladies, and desired to protest 
her resolution to remain in the unwedded state, 
she expressed herself after this manner : " My 
pride is superior to any feelings I have yet ex- 
perienced, my affection is strong admiration, not 
the necessity of giving or receiving assistance or 
sympathy.'' In this innocent remark Mrs. Howe 
finds proof that "she acknowledges the insuffi- 
ciency of human knowledge, bows her imperial 
head, and confesses herself human." Thirdly, 
when Mr. Higginson is describing the diverse 
elements present at the inception of that strange 
literary product, the " Dial," he refers to it as 
an " alembic within which they were all distilled, 
and the priestess who superintended this intellec- 
tual chemic process happened to be Margaret 
Fuller." All this time, he admits, he had in his 
possession documents pertaining to an early love 
affair, which, if published, as they have since 
been, " would bring her nearer to us, by proving 
that she with all her Roman ambition was still 
a woman at heart." If Margaret Fuller be treated 



158 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

as an imperial being, who only in a mood of self- 
depreciation, or in a moment of magnanimity 
bows her head and confesses herself human ; if 
she be looked upon as a Roman priestess superin- 
tending a chemical process going on in an alem- 
bic, or as a " rapt sylph " — this was Bronson 
Alcott's view, expressed in sonnet form, as if she 
were a Sixth Avenue seer — we shall never get 
much further. 

If, however, she be considered merely as a 
woman, we may get some light upon her person- 
ality ; but if this matter be too high for us, cer- 
tainly we shall get some light upon the person- 
ality of that strange group which has written it- 
self down as her friends. They all lived together 
during a period of folly, it is true ; but that is 
not the whole matter. A New England prophet 
has always had the most honour in his own coun- 
try, amongst his own kin ; and, contrary to the 
observation of Emerson, the ship from a Massa- 
chusetts port has ever been more romantic to its 
own passengers than any other which sailed the 
high seas. 

At any rate, Margaret Fuller was an interest- 
ing personage, interesting even yet, and we shall 
first show forth fully the presentation her bio- 
graphers make, before enquiring what manner of 



MARGARET FULLER 159 

woman she really was. Mrs. Howe protests that 
" to surpass the works of Clarke, Emerson, and 
Channing is not to be thought of ; " but she has 
surpassed them and made their " precious remi- 
niscences " more precious still. She found ready- 
to her hand a most unfortunate document, namely, 
the introductory chapter to an autobiographical 
romance, entitled " Marianna," written by Mar- 
garet Fuller herself, which was seized upon and 
dealt with as authentic history. It deals with her 
childhood, and when elevated out of its proper 
place, conveys an impression of the individual 
which is totally wrong. Few men, and fewer 
women, could desire that the vagaries of their 
childhood should be remembered against them. 
Even the sick-bed delirium of the neurotic child 
is preserved for our admiration. As delirium it 
is excellent, as biography it is misleading. 

Margaret Fuller was a neurotic child and suf- 
fered from actual hysteria. Ideas controlled her 
body, and as the ideas of a child are of the 
slightest fabric, it may be imagined what that 
control amounted to. In the children of New 
England from the earliest time there has been 
a streak of hysteria which has occasionally broad- 
ened out into a dark pool of human misery and 
deception. 



1G0 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

At nine years of age the little Margaret was 
sent to school in Groton, where she amused and 
tormented teachers and pupils by her fantastic 
freaks. In return they penetrated a bit of plea- 
santry upon her, with the result that she went to 
her room, locked the door, and fell into convul- 
sions. Quite naturally for a child in her condi- 
tion, she "did not disdain to employ misrepre- 
sentation to regain the superiority in which she 
delighted," and when convicted, " she threw her- 
self down, dashed her head upon the iron hearth, 
and was taken up senseless." Old Judge Stough- 
ton of Salem thought he understood the import 
of such manifestations. 

No wonder the child's character " somewhat 
puzzled her teacher ; " it has misled her bio- 
graphers too, and will be certain to puzzle them 
till the essential nature of hysteria is disclosed. 
They should not have been puzzled. By heredity 
the child was endowed with a nervous organisa- 
tion, mobile and abnormally sensitive, and her 
environment was not peculiarly suited to her 
temperament. All of her paternal relations wore 
eccentric, some of them were of unstable will, 
and she herself was accredited with genius. The 
Puritan girl has ever been a pitiable and I 
figure. The child's education could not have been 



MARGARET FULLER 161 

worse devised. Timothy Fuller, her father, was 
a lawyer, politician, and son of a country clergy- 
man, bred in the Harvard of those days, absorbed 
in the interest and business of his profession, " in- 
tent upon compassing the support of his family," 
all of which proves his incapacity as educator of 
his own child. The mother is described as " one 
of those fair flower-like natures," which abounded 
in the early days. These pilgrim mothers doubt- 
less had their own trials. Had the management 
of the child been left to her, we might have 
escaped all this pathological record of hysteria. 
The incapacity of every father is now, I believe, 
a subject of free and frequent comment in the 
domestic circle ; in those days the father's wisdom 
and authority went unquestioned. 

The child's surroundings, we are told, were 
devoid of artistic luxury, and that was quite 
proper, if these surroundings be regarded merely 
as the " prophetic entrance to immortality ; " but 
she had to frequent them a weary time before she 
found the door. Truly, as Mrs. Howe says, there 
was an absence of frivolity and a distaste for all 
that is paltry and superficial, — small danger that 
her " inner sense of beauty would be lost or over- 
laid through much pleasing of the eye and ear." 
No wonder the child acquired a great " aversion 



162 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

to the meal-time ceremonial, so long, so tiresome," 
that her aunts cried out upon the " spoiled child, 
the most unreasonable child that ever was, if 
brother could but open his eyes to see it." After 
being kept awake for hours, waiting till her father 
should return to hear her recite the labours of the 
day, no wonder her aunts were puzzled at her un- 
willingness to go to bed. These good women did 
not know that as soon as the light was taken 
away the little girl saw colossal faces advancing 
slowly, the eyes dilating and each feature swelling 
loathsomely, to return again after being driven 
away by her shriek of terror. When at length 
she did go to sleep, it was to dream of horses 
trampling over her, or, as she had just read in her 
Virgil, of being amongst trees that dripped with 
blood, where she walked and walked and could 
not get out, whilst the blood became a pool and 
splashed over her feet, rising higher and higher 
till soon she dreamed it would reach her lips. 
No wonder she arose and walked in her sleep, 
moaning, all over the house, or found drenched 
with tears, in the morning, the pillow on which 
she had been dreaming that she was following 
her mother to the grave. Where was the mother 
all this time ? Alas for our poor mothers ! 

Another example of her father's perspicacity 



MARGARET FULLER 163 

still remains, in his opinion that " she would go 
crazy if she did not leave off thinking of such 
things," little suspecting that he and his system 
were the enchanters that called forth these night 
monsters. At the age of six, this infant was em- 
ployed in the study of Latin, though her young 
life was " somewhat " enlivened by the lightness 
of English grammar, " and other subjects various 
as the hours would allow." At eight, the Latin 
language had opened for her the door to many 
delights, for the Roman ideal, definite and resolute, 
commended itself to her childish judgement : in 
Horace she enjoyed the courtly appreciation of 
life; in Ovid, the first glimpse of mythology 
carried her to the Greek Olympus — at least her 
biographers say they think so, but that is probably 
a guess. The modern counterpart of this " wonder 
child " is the " laboratory child," whose food is 
weighed and calculated in calories, the result of 
it measured by all the processes of kinetics. 

One Sabbath morning the young child was cast- 
ing her eyes over the meeting for religious pur- 
poses, in a vain search for the Eoman figures she 
knew so well, for the characters from Shakespeare 
that she loved. They only met the shrewd honest 
eye, the homely decency, or the smartness of the 
New England village ; or her gaze rested upon a 



164 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

family occupying the next pew, which was her 
particular aversion, for, as she tells us, " the 
father had a Scotch look of shrewd narrowness 
and entire self-complacency." As she looked 
about, her attention was next arrested by a 
woman foreign to that scene, with her fair face, 
her strange dress, the unusual arrangement of 
her hair, her reserved, self-possessed manner. 
Such an " apparition " would arrest attention in 
Cambridgeport even in these times. The stranger 
proved to be an English lady who possessed the 
two remarkable accomplishments of painting in 
oils and playing on the harp. It appears that there 
were others who admired the stranger in their 
own way ; " but she lightly turned her head from 
their oppressive looks and fixed a glance of full- 
eyed sweetness on the child." The relation be- 
tween the two was delightful, till at length the 
stranger " went across the sea." They corre- 
sponded for many years, as the habit then was, 
and even her " shallow and delicate epistles M did 
not serve to disenchant the growing girl. This is 
not the usual result of a long correspondence. 

Left alone, Margaret fell into melancholy 
again, and her father, who further reveals himself 
in his " distrust of medical aid generally," appears 
to have had a conversation with his sisters, during 



MARGARET FULLER 165 

which some heat was manifested. At any rate, 
he concluded to send his daughter to school with 
her " peers in age." The school chosen was the 
Misses Prescott's at Groton, as has already been 
indicated. There, as Mrs. Howe observes, she 
was content, " so long as she could queen it over 
her fellow pupils, but the first serious wounding 
of her self-love aroused in her a vengeful malig- 
nity," — fearful words to employ in relation to 
a girl of tender years. 

Doubtless these things occur in boarding- 
schools at this day, if we can believe what we 
hear; when they are made the material of an 
autobiographical romance they are apt to assume 
a false importance. It was in this school that the 
foolish bit of pleasantry occurred. The children, 
shocking as it may sound, were permitted to 
indulge in play-acting, in which Margaret had 
a peculiar facility. To help the illusion, they were 
allowed to heighten the natural colour of the face, 
but Margaret did not observe the unity of time 
and place in respect of the rouge ; she employed 
it at unseasonable times. The pleasantry arose 
out of that, and was followed by the turbulence 
of conduct on Margaret's part which " somewhat 
puzzled " her teachers, as it would not have 
puzzled the judges of Salem. Mrs. Howe further 



1G6 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

notes that, during the progress of the affair, 
" Margaret's pride did not forsake her ; she sum- 
moned to her aid the fortitude of her Komans 
and ate her dinner quietly," though she afterwards 
conducted herself in a wholly Gallic fashion. 

Fortunately the pupil was dealt with by a 
teacher who wrought upon her by narrating the 
circumstances of her own life, which had made it 
one of sorrow and sacrifice ; a common enough 
practice, I believe, amongst governesses, but one 
would dearly love to know the secret story of 
this New England school-teacher. At any rate, 
Margaret left the school at the age of thirteen, 
and returned to her father's house, "much in- 
structed in the conditions of harmonious relations 
with her fellows," qualities very essential to 
peaceable living in the Cambridgeport of those 
days. 

Margaret, as her friends called her, omitting the 
first name Sarah — they called Emerson. Waldo 
— returned from school at the end of her thir- 
teenth year. Dr. Frederic Henry Hedge, whose 
one sufficient claim upon our notice is that he 
was her friend, gives us a lively picture of her at 
this time, lie was a student at Harvard : allow- 
ance must be made for that, as students at Har- 
vard, or any other college for the matter of that. 



MARGARET FULLER 167 

must not be followed absolutely in their estima- 
tion of a feminine personality. 

According to this authority, her precocity, men- 
tal and physical, he also notes, was such that she 
passed for a much older person, and had already 
a recognized place in society. She was in bloom- 
ing and vigorous health, with a tendency to over- 
stoutness, which he thinks gave her some trouble, 
though he does not quite specify in what way. 
She was not handsome, nor even pretty, he admits, 
but we all know the combination of feminine 
features and qualities which college students con- 
sider handsome and pretty. She had fine hair 
and teeth, he adds with discrimination, and a 
peculiarly graceful carriage of the head and neck 
which redeemed her from the charge of plain- 
ness. Sixteen years afterwards, this same neck 
seems to have impressed Mr. Channing, who 
dwells with much feeling upon its pliancy and 
other qualities ; " in moments of tender and pen- 
sive feeling its curves were like those of a swan ; 
under the influence of indignation its movements 
were more like the swooping of a bird of prey." 
He mentions a habit of opening the eyes and 
fluttering them suddenly, with a singular dilation 
of the iris, which must have deepened this im- 
pression of her likeness to a bird. Nor are we 



168 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

left without Emerson's observations upon her 
appearance : " She had a face and frame that 
would indicate fulness and tenacity of life " — 
the philosophers of those days were hard bitten 
by phrenology. " She was then, as always, care- 
fully and becomingly dressed, and of lady-like 
self-possession. For the rest, her appearance had 
nothing prepossessing. Her extreme plainness, a 
trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eye- 
lids, the nasal tone of her voice, all repelled. Soon 
her wit effaced the impression of her unattract- 
iveness, and the eyes which were so plain at first 
swam with fun and drollery." This was in 1836. 
She was in her twenty-seventh year, he was 
thirty-three — these facts are worth noting — 
but in Mrs. Howe's judgement, " Emerson's bane 
was a want of fusion, the ruling characteristic of 
Mr. Channing a heart that melted almost too 
easily." 

Miss Fuller's studios did not cease upon being 
admitted as a recognised member of Cambridge- 
port society. Her " pursuit of culture " was ar- 
dent, and she was resolute to track it to its lair. 
She rose before five, walked for an hour, practised 
on the piano till seven, had breakfast, read French 
till eight, then attended two or three lectin 
Brown's philosophy. At half-past nine she went 



MARGARET FULLER 169 

to Mr. Perkins's school, and studied Greek till 
twelve, when she went home and practised on the 
piano till two. If the conversation were very- 
agreeable she sometimes lounged for half an hour 
at dessert, though rarely so lavish of time. Then, 
when she could, she read two hours in Italian ; 
at six, she walked or drove, then sang for half an 
hour before retiring for a little while to write in 
her journal. This is doubtless what she intended 
to do ; but as Sir James Fitzjames Stephen ob- 
served, " you cannot always infer from the state- 
ment of the fact to the truth of it." 

It is true, however, that Miss Fuller was en- 
gaged in serious study. Moved by the brilliant 
expositions of Carlyle, she commenced the study 
of German, and within a year had read Goethe, 
Schiller, Tieck, Korner, Richter, and Novalis — 
fine-sounding names. She was able to appreciate 
" the imperfection of Novalis, and the shallowness 
of Lessing." She thought him " easily followed, 
strong, but not deep." Impressed with the value 
of a fixed opinion on the subject of metaphysics, 
she applied herself to the study of Fichte, Stuart, 
and Brown — the Scotch schoolmaster who at- 
tempted to fill in with hollow rhetoric the gulf 
between youth and Presbyterianism. This ambi- 
tious young woman, after a year's study of Ger- 



170 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

man in New England, entertained the idea of 
writing a life of Goethe, and constructing six his- 
torical tragedies, which would have been a fairly 
marvellous production. In spite of all this em- 
ployment, she continued to feel " a merciful and 
providential interest in her friends." 

At twenty-one years of age this strange person 
found " the past worthless, the future hopeless." 
The occasion of this discovery was Thanksgiving 
Day, the place, church. After dinner the outlook 
was rather more gloomy, and she sought to free 
herself from anguish by a long quick walk. This 
was a thoroughly sound physiological proceeding, 
and she hoped to return home in a state of 
prayer. Luther in a similar case had recourse to 
a draught of strong sweet wine. It was a sad 
and sallow day, and, driven from place to place 
by the conflict within her, she sat down at last to 
rest beside a little pool, dark and silent, within 
the trees. This must have been about five in the 
afternoon ; dinner was at two ; we all feel that way 
at times, but if we are wise we do not speak of it. 
Suddenly the sun broke through the clouds, and 
" the inward conquest was sealed by the sunbeam 
of that sallow day." Then she saw that k% there 
was no self, that it was only because she thought 
self real that she suffered, that she had only to 



MARGARET FULLER 171 

live in the idea of the all, and all was hers." 
This sounds strangely familiar in our ears. 

Two years later, in 1833, Margaret Fuller and 
her family, in the false language of the period, 
"exchanged the academic shades of Cambridge- 
port for the country retirement of Groton " — Mr. 
Higginson himself speaks of Artichoke Mills on 
the Merrimac as " a delicious land of lotos-eating." 
She did not, we are glad to learn, take the position 
of a malcontent, but busied herself in teaching 
her brothers and sisters, in needlework, and in 
assisting her mother, a thoroughly useful occupa- 
tion. But soon we find her at a careful perusal 
of Alfieri's writings and an examination into the 
evidence of Christianity, for it would appear that 
infidels and deists, some of whom were numbered 
among her friends, had instilled into her mind 
distressing sceptical notions. It will be observed 
that it was deists, and not atheists, who poisoned 
this young New England mind. 

It was during this period that Margaret Fuller 
met Miss Harriet Martineau, and the stranger 
appears to have been rather free in her remarks, 
for we have it on record that her depreciation of 
Hannah More grated on Miss Fuller's sensibil- 
ities. The two ladies went to church together, and 
the minister gave them the distinction of being 



172 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

prayed for. This induced Margaret herself to 
utter a prayer which she afterwards committed to 
writing, though the uttering of it may have been 
a dramatic afterthought. Some sceptics affect to 
question the efficacy of the minister's prayer, for 
one of the persons to whom it was addressed be- 
came in time an " enthusiastic disbeliever." This 
imputed unrighteousness, however, occurred after 
the publication of Miss Martineau's book, " So- 
ciety in America," in 1836. In this work, as well 
as in her " Autobiography," she indulged in some 
tolerably plain speaking. She sets it down for a 
fact that she found the coterie in Boston occupied 
in talk about fanciful and shallow conceits which 
they took for philosophy, and that Miss Fuller was 
spoiling a set of well-meaning women by looking 
down upon people who acted instead of talking 
finely. However this may be, we have Margaret's 
opinion of the book in an M immense " letter 
addressed to its author, in which she tells her she 
found in it a degree of presumptuousness, irre- 
verence, inaccuracy, hasty generalization, ultra- 
ism, and many other evil things. Ten years later, 
the ladies met again, but no heat appears to have 
been developed. It was to Miss Martineau the 
young lady was indebted for an introduction to 
Kinerson, " whom she very mueh wished to know," 



MARGARET FULLER 173 

and all three became very good friends. Emerson 
speaks of his impression of these early interviews 
with a polite reserve, as if he were writing a letter 
of commendation for a friend whom he wished to 
be rid of. " I believe, I fancied her too much in- 
terested in personal history, and dramatic justice 
was done to everybody's foibles." It is pretty hard 
to take any comfort out of that, yet again he 
insists that "her good services were somewhat 
impaired by a self-esteem which it would have 
been unfortunate for her disciples to imitate." It 
is certain that those disciples were not deterred 
by this gentle remonstrance from manifestations 
of self-esteem. It was unfortunate, but then 
Emerson had already laid himself open to the 
charge of " a want of fusion." 

In the autumn of 1835 the father, Timothy 
Fuller, died, leaving his property " somewhat di- 
minished," as many a worse man has done. If it 
were the present intention to deal with that heroic 
period in the world's history of which the Puritan 
development in New England formed a part, 
especially dwelling upon the strength and splen- 
dour of character therein displayed, we could not 
do better than follow the fortunes of the Fuller 
family up to its source. The origin of the family, 
in America at least, was in Lieutenant Thomas 



174 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

Fuller, who came over in 1638. We have his 
own word for it in verse : 

In thirty-eight I set my foot 

On this New England shore, 
My thoughts were then to stay one year, 

And here remain no more. 

The great-grandson of this lieutenant and poet 
was Timothy Fuller, and the eldest son of this 
Timothy was another of the same name, the father 
of Margaret. Miss Fuller's grandfather grad- 
uated, or was graduated as it was the fashion of 
that time to say, from Harvard College in 1760, 
and settled in Princeton (Massachusetts) as a 
clergyman. 

It is the custom to suppose that the events cul- 
minating in the American Revolution were of an 
entirely spontaneous origin. As a matter of fact 
there was much contention, much bitterness, and 
many opponents of extreme measures. This cler- 
gyman was a firm opponent, and on the occasion 
of taking up arms he addressed his parishioners 
from a text which is susceptible of much vindict- 
iveness in the handling. As a result he was dis- 
missed from his charge, and he brought suit to 
recover his salary. The affair appears to have 
been adjusted, for we find him once more in 
his pastorate, but recalcitrant as ever, voting in 



MARGARET FULLER 175 

the State Convention against the acceptance of 
the Constitution for the United Colonies, on the 
ground that that instrument did not define the 
relation of human slavery to free institutions. 
Some will consider this old Puritan a far-seeing 
man. His five sons were all lawyers, and so far 
as one can judge did not attain to any great emi- 
nence for winsomeness of nature or agreeableness 
of behaviour. It would appear that Margaret 
inherited some of those qualities which are not 
designed to win the public heart; indeed, one 
observer, himself a man of intemperate speech, 
thought he found in her " the disagreeableness of 
forty Fullers." 

Margaret's father was the eldest of these five 
lawyers, not to designate them by so humane a 
name as sons, and he must have been a person of 
some consideration. He was, of course, a gradu- 
ate of Harvard, a representative in Congress, 
Chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs, 
and an intimate friend of John Quincy Adams. 
Indeed, the President visited Mr. Fuller and was 
present at a dinner and ball given in his honour. 
At this time Mr. Fuller lived in the fine old 
house built by Chief Justice Dana, and, what is 
of more interest to us, this was the occasion of 
his daughter's first public appearance. 



176 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

To show how faithfully the field has been 
gleaned, we are not left without an exact account 
of the figure that the young lady made at this 
ball. She is described as a young girl of sixteen, 
with a very plain face, half-shut eyes, and hair 
curled all over her head. She was laced so tightly 
that she had to hold her arms back as if they 
were pinioned. Her dress was of pink silk with 
muslin over it, low in the neck, and badly cut. 
She danced awkwardly, and was so shortsighted 
that she could hardly see her partner. It will 
appear at once that this description is by another 
young lady, and therefore that the reporter's con- 
temporary was of an attractive personality. 

The Fullers did not long occupy this mansion, 
but made several moves before retiring to Groton 
in 1833, where the father died two years later. 
The consequent family cares prevented the daugh- 
ter's acceptance of a proposition made to her by 
Mr. Farrar, professor of astronomy at Harvard, 
and his wife, to visit Europe in company with 
Miss Martineau. Margaret prayed that she might 
make a right decision — an operation wholly 
needless, one woidd think, as the answer was so 
obvious from her resources. In the pious enquiry 
of one of her admirers, " Of all the crownings 
of Margaret's life, shall we not most envy her 



MARGARET FULLER 177 

that of this act of sacrifice? " one finds a revela- 
tion of the meretricious surroundings in which 
she lived — as meretricious as the surroundings 
in which Mark Pattison lived at the same time, 
when Oxford also was overtaken by folly. 

In 1836 the young woman went to Boston, under 
engagement with Mr. A. Bronson Alcott to teach 
Latin and French in his school. To these lan- 
guages she added Italian and German. One would 
think from the published accounts that she had 
the gift of tongues, and was able to confer it upon 
her pupils — a gift of doubtful utility where 
women are concerned, as a wise old Puritan 
observed in the bitterness of his spirit, during the 
troubled time when Mrs. Hutchinson was turn- 
ing the world upside down. One young woman 
maliciously circulated the report that their teacher 
thought in German. Yet when Miss Fuller went 
to Paris she " might as usefully have been in a 
well," for all the good her French did her. When 
she met her Italian husband in Rome, she could 
only exchange a few guide-book words; six 
months after that meeting, she still " spoke very 
bad French fluently." When she called upon 
George Sand, that lady greeted her with the 
familiar " C'est vousf " Miss Fuller replied : "21 
me fait de bien de vous voir" which is bad French, 



178 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

but amusing. Her biographers are careful to 
alter the expression to "II me fait da Lien de 
vous voir" which is better ; but the incident 
illustrates their incapacity to tell of a thing as it 
occurred and their uncontrollable desire to exag- 
gerate. 

It appears there were " worldlings " in Boston 
in those days and that they held Mr. Alcott in as 
much honour " as the worldlings of ancient Athens 
did Socrates." It " made them smile " to hear 
their verdict confirmed by Miss Martineau from 
the other side of the Atlantic : hence the vigour 
of speech in the letter condemning her book. Mr. 
Alcott appears to have had his own troubles. 
There was a serious proposition to prosecute him 
for blasphemy, and on the appearance of his book, 
"Conversations on the Gospels," a professor of 
Harvard is quoted as affirming that one third of it 
was absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third 
obscene. In a very short time this famous school 
contained only five pupils — three of them Mr. 
Alcott's daughters, a colored child, and one other. 
Miss Fuller's labours as a teacher in Boston were 
at an end, so she went to Providence to teach in 
Colonel Fuller's school. Her salary was to be 
a thousand dollars, but there is some question as 
to whether it was ever paid. Miss Fuller re- 



MARGARET FULLER 179 

mained in Providence two years, and during that 
time made the acquaintance of many persons 
whose names we know, amongst them Kichard 
Henry Dana, and his son, who had just returned 
from his wanderings over the sea. Colonel Ful- 
ler, who was no relation of Margaret, shortly 
afterwards went to New York on the staff of the 
" Mirror," then conducted by K P. Willis and 
George P. Morris, but he did not remain long, as 
he " got tired of supporting two poets." In those 
days, it would appear, newspapers were conducted 
by men of literary taste, and this course seemed 
as natural to the readers as that a ship should 
be commanded by a sea-captain. 

All these volumes of memoirs, reminiscences, 
letters, and diaries, and even these present writ- 
ings, may seem a great thing about a very small 
matter, for we have not yet heard one word of 
sense from Margaret Fuller herself. But that is 
part of the enigma. If you ask her biographers 
wherein consisted the capacity of this woman, 
they will answer with one accord, " in her conver- 
sations ; " a statement obviously difficult to dis- 
prove at this distance of time. The converse of the 
Platonic proposition, that ideas are inseparable 
from speech, is not universally true, and we can- 
not now say what was the ratio of ideas to words. 



180 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

Certainly there was a great deal of speech. All 
authorities agree upon that, though Miss Marti- 
neau for one did not attach any high value to it. 
Dr. Hedge, one of Miss Fuller's earliest admirers, 
remarked upon her conversation, " brilliant and 
full of interest, but with a satirical turn, which 
became somewhat modified in after life." Mr. 
Clarke bears the same testimony, but admits that 
she was haughty and supercilious to what he calls 
the multitude, and attributes this to her being 
" intensive " rather than " extensive," though this 
explanation does not advance our enquiry very 
far. Strangers, we are further told, were wary 
of her on account of a haunting fear of being 
reduced to an absurdity. For all these reasons 
we must infer that her talk was interesting to 
the immediate circle of her friends. 

When Miss Fuller returned from Providence, 
she decided to turn to account her ability to talk, 
and in 1839 began her celebrated " Conversations" 
in Miss Peabody's rooms, West Street, Boston. 
She talked for five years, not without intermissions 
of course, but that was her principal occupation 
till she left New England. M Unfortunately." as 
Mrs. Howe judged, " the pulpit and the platform 
were interdicted to her sex, but here was an oppor- 
tunity to arouse women from their prone and 



MARGARET FULLER 181 

• 

slavish attitude." At the first meeting twenty- 
five ladies were present, " who showed themselves 
to be of the elect by their own election of a noble 
aim " — Unitarian doctrine truly, Arianism, Socin- 
ianism, for less than which men, and women too, 
had been hanged in that very Boston. The first 
Conversation was devoted to Mythology, as being 
sufficiently separated from all exciting local 
subjects; but it is hard to say what subjects 
might not have excited the Boston of those days ; 
it became excited over less. 

In spite of the evidence of direct observers to 
the contrary, Margaret Fuller is said to have ap- 
peared positively beautiful in her chair of leader- 
ship ; even her dress was glorified, although it was 
known to have been characterized by no display 
or attempted effect. However that may have been, 
it is certain that these people could not see 
clearly, for we are asked to credit the statement 
that twenty-five Boston ladies of the year 1840 
" seemed melted into one love." In addition to 
the meetings for ladies, there was a series of five 
meetings to which " gentlemen " were admitted. 
Mr. Emerson was present at one of them, and he 
testifies that it was encumbered by the headiness 
or incapacity of the men. 

These happy labours continued for six winters, 



182 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

• 

and came to an end in April, 1844, but in the 
mean time they had not consumed all of Miss 
Fuller's energy. She was actively engaged in the 
study of art. The masters of art were studied by 
means of casts in the Boston Athenaeum, in a 
collection of Allston's paintings, and some sculp- 
tures of Greenough and Crawford. Upon these 
rather fragmentary data she appears to have at- 
tained to some finality of opinion, though, accord- 
ing to Emerson, a certain fanciful interpretation 
of her own sometimes took the place of a just 
estimate of artistic values. If the Boston of those 
days was less rich in art treasures than it is now, 
we have it on high authority that it was " richer 
in the intellectual form of appreciative criticism." 
It may be so ; one of their own has said it. At 
any rate, Emerson considered that Miss Fuller's 
taste in art was not based on universal but on 
idiosyncratic grounds. No one blames the young 
woman for being so foolish, but the people around 
her must have been extremely foolish to listen and 
to praise her. And so she lived surrounded by flat- 
terers, and the most subtle flattery of a woman ii 
that which is addressed to her intellect, because 
it helps to allay the suspicion that she has none. 
There are but two incidents yet to relate before 
emerging into the air. The one is Miss Fuller's 



MARGARET FULLER 183 

editorship of the " Dial ; " the other, her connec- 
tion with Brook Farm. The painter Newton 
made the remark that in London he met occa- 
sionally such society as he met in Boston all the 
time, which in itself is a dark saying, but at any 
rate it was necessary that these friends should 
have an organ of printed speech. As Leigh Hunt 
said of one of the fraternity, they were wavering 
between something and nothing, and now they 
looked for permanency in the " Dial." This jour- 
nal appeared in 1840, and was issued at intervals, 
more or less regular, for four years. Good or 
bad, it cost a great deal of precious time from 
those who served it, and from Margaret most of 
all ; that was Emerson's view of the publication. 
The idea of a journal was promoted by the appear- 
ance in England of the "New Monthly Maga- 
zine," whose editor, Heraud, is described by 
Carlyle as " a loquacious, scribacious little man, 
of middle age and a parboiled greasy aspect." 

The " Dial," then, was the organ of the Tran- 
scendentalists — the word would slip out at last ; 
the meaning of it is that their utterances had 
passed beyond the limits of good sense — and as 
such it is a treasury of information, containing, 
as it does, work fresh from the hand of Emerson, 
Lowell, Thoreau, Cranch, the Channings, Alcott, 



184 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

and Parker, upon such subjects as, the Interior 
of the Hidden Life, the Outworld and the In- 
world, and many other large subjects, which we 
do not now comprehend. It would appear that 
even in those days of enlightenment there were 
some who cared for none of these things, and the 
editor of the Philadelphia " Gazette " so far for- 
got himself as to call the writers a pack of zanies, 
and to apply to them other opprobrious epithets 
of plainer meaning. 

Those were curious times ; men were full of 
hope and everybody had a gospel of his own. 
Graham preached the regeneration of the world 
through the medium of unbolted flour, and we 
have not yet freed ourselves from the heresy ; 
Alcott preached a " potato " gospel, and Palmer 
re-discovered the source of evil to be, not in the 
love of money, but in money itself. A strange 
fruit of the materialism of their doctrine is found 
in the fact that the best reward they held out was 
a long life, as if that in itself were a wholly desir- 
able thing. 

It is easy at this distance of time to speak of 
that ingenious experiment in altruism known as 
Brook Farm with calmness and understanding. 
It was an innocent form of folly and the motives 
of the associates were wholly good. These ex- 



MARGARET FULLER 185 

tremely speculative persons manifested a pure 
and fresh spirit, and an unquestioning faith in 
the regeneration of men, qualities excellent in 
themselves, but the leaven was very little and its 
force soon spent. Including the preliminary 
period of talk, the whole fanciful affair only lasted 
some four or five years, and then vanished into 
the void with other good and aimless intentions. 
There was abundant enthusiasm and amiability, 
qualities one may see in a company of otherwise 
serious-minded men riding through the streets of 
a Western town on the backs of camels, with 
strange banners in their hands ; but, as Mr. 
James observes, there were degrees of enthusiasm, 
and there must have been degrees of amiability 
too. The failure of the experiment arose from the 
nature of the case. J. Gr. Holland, who was one 
of them, wrote : 

We hope, we resolve, we aspire, we pray, 
And we think we mount the air on wings 
Beyond the recall of sensual things, 
Whilst our feet still cling to the heavy clay. 

Precisely ; this is not very good poetry, but it is 
good sense. Their feet too were in the clay. 

The people who composed the Brook Farm 
community were for the most part insignificant. 
Emerson was gently sarcastic and mildly critical 



186 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

throughout. In the cloud of talk we hear his 
voice : u truly it is not instruction, but provoca- 
tion, I can receive from another soul." Haw- 
thorne gloomed in a corner for hours at a time, 
holding a book before him, but seldom turning 
the leaves. His companions accused him of com- 
ing to the place as a sort of vampire, for purely 
psychological purposes. His attitude is revealed 
in one of his notes : " I was invited to dine with 
Miss Margaret Fuller, but Providence had given 
me some business to do, for which I was very 
thankful." Even Margaret herself thought that 
one of the best things about the Farm was its 
nearness to the woods, and escape so easy : she 
was sagacious enough to observe a "great tend- 
ency to advocate spontaneousness at the expense 
of reflection." A curious way in which this spon- 
taneity revealed itself was in designating the 
cows by the names of the inmates. Margaret felt 
the evils of want of conventional refinement in 
the impudence with which one of the girls treated 
her. This same young woman, however, was 
afterwards brought to see the enormity of her 
offence, and on the following Saturday, as Mar- 
garet was leaving, u she stood waiting with a 
timid air " to bid her good-bye. On another occa- 
sion she observed a M lack of the deferenee she 



MARGARET FULLER 187 

needed for the boldness and animation of her 
part, and so did not speak with as much force as 
usual." 

The movement illustrates well the vagaries of 
philosophic speculation. No one can tell whither 
it leads or where it will end if it be allowed free 
play. It would be long to trace the origin of the 
movement, for its ways were long and devious. 
It is sufficient to say that it came from France, 
through Fourier, who in turn derived his inspi- 
ration from Rousseau, and he in turn from Locke 
and his school ; but that is far enough. 

In England, when the speculation had reached 
a certain point and the conclusion was seen to be 
logically inevitable, the common sense of the 
English mind came to the rescue. The people 
perceived that the course of life can never be 
determined by a priori reasoning. In France the 
doctrinaires gained control, and were determined 
to push their reasoning to a conclusion. The issue 
was the entirely logical Eevolution, and they 
accepted it, just as the Calvinist accepts hell. 
Their great cry was " Eeturn to Nature," but it 
was modified by the German voice, and modu- 
lated by some suggestions of Hellenism, before 
it came across to New England as a faint echo. 

There was a new spirit in the air. In England 



188 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

people had turned aside and applied themselves 
to the amendment of their lives, after the method 
of AVesley ; in America its result was seen tempo- 
rarily, and perhaps accidentally, in the clouds 
of transcendentalism — if that be not too for- 
midable a word to employ — but finally in the 
humanizing results of the great Unitarian move- 
ment. 

Margaret Fuller herself was quick enough to 
perceive that Fourierism was entirely material- 
istic in motive and aim, " making the soul the 
result of bodily health, instead of body the mere 
clothing of the soul." It is not by any material 
thing that either the individual or the mass will 
be altered for the better. 

But, after all, is Nature only Nature as seen on 
a rare day in June, in the sweet fields and woods 
of New England ? Is it not to be looked for also 
when we lift up our eyes to the mountains, scarred 
by catastrophe or seamed by the frosts of winter, 
and proclaiming the effect of the slow invulner- 
able forces that make for disintegration and 
decay? If those who carried this cry farthest had 
ears to hear, and had listened on the sweetest 
evening, they would have heard the rustle of the 
viper in the dead leaves, the stealthy tread of 
some small beast relentlessly pursuing a smaller 



MARGARET FULLER 189 

beast of prey ; they would have heard the cry of 
the hunted and the anguished scream of the last 
agony. The very wood of West Koxbury was 
a world of plunder and death ; Nature, there too, 
was one with rapine ; the Mayfly was torn by the 
swallow; the sparrow speared by the shrike — • 
that is, if shrikes inhabit New England in June. 

It is only in semi-rural communities that there 
is a desire to escape farther from civilization. 
Zola knew the soil and what it brings forth — 
squalor and brutality. Nature worship is as false 
a religion as the worship of any other material 
thing. It is Ashtoreth in another guise, save that 
amongst the Brook Farmers the false worship was 
not in the slightest degree associated with sexual 
immorality, and that was the only strange thing 
about it. Yet platonic love is always silly, and 
sometimes it is dangerous, according to the judi- 
cious observation of the Master of Peterhouse. 
Not since the days of the Assyrian King have 
men become sane by being turned out to grass ; 
and those who talk of the regeneration of the 
race through Nature, " talk as a bull would talk." 
We have Johnson's word for that. 

These people attempted to realize Dryden's 
dream of an early age, " when wild in woods the 
noble savage ran," or in reality, as Mr. Bagehot 



190 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

prefers it, " when lone in woods the cringing 
savage crept." Emerson tried to teach them that 
heroism lies in doing the daily work. Innes after- 
wards proclaimed that beauty is in the meadow 
and the woodland of the back lot, as he had 
learned from Rousseau, Dupre, Daubigny, and 
Millet, that the paysage intime contains that 
beauty which we are all prone to go far to seek. 
Innes was always protesting that " rivers, streams, 
the rippling brook, the hillside, the sky, and the 
clouds can only convey their sentiment to those 
who are in the love of God and the desire of the 
truth." 

The Transcendentalists of New England had 
those two qualities, love of God and love of the 
truth, and any Calvinist could tell where they ob- 
tained them. Certainly it was not in West Rox- 
bury. And yet to this day these devotees are 
unthinkingly held up to our admiration — men 
who declined the duties of everyday life, who, like 
the melancholy Democritus, M forsook the city, 
lived in groves and hollow trees upon a green 
bank by a brookside or confluence of wati 
day long and all night." They saw the evil that 
is in the world as clearly as we see it, but they 
thought there was a remedy in exchanging the 
old physicians for new quacks. We know there 



MARGARET FULLER 191 

is none, save that which comes in the ordinary- 
course of events. 

It must not be supposed that Margaret Fuller 
and her friends had it all their own way. The 
American public saw to that. There was humour 
in the land then as now, and there was common 
sense. The little coterie made a large noise and 
their successors took up its echoes, but it must 
not be inferred that the voice of the men of com- 
mon sense was either still or small. They met 
with neglect and ridicule ; Cranch made carica- 
tures ; Lowell wrote doggerel. One of his stanzas 
in "A Fable for Critics" thus describes Mar- 
garet Fuller under the guise of Miranda : 

She will take an old notion and make it her own 

By saying it o'er in her Sibylline tone, 

Or persuade you 't is something tremendously deep, 

By repeating it so as to put you to sleep ; 

And she well may defy any mortal to see through it 

When once she has mixed up her infinite me through it. 

In short, then, Margaret Fuller became, in the 
minds of sensible people, the watchword for all 
that was eccentric and pretentious, the embodi- 
ment of all that was ungraceful and unf eminine ; 
yet if any of those scoffers thought Margaret 
Fuller a fool, he was vastly mistaken, though there 
was something to be said for that view of the case ; 



192 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

if lie arrived at the same conclusion in respect of 
her friends, who fostered all this folly, this is not 
the place to contradict him. 

In 1844 Margaret Fuller went to New York. 
She seems to have had her eyes opened to the 
futility of the life in Boston. In a letter to a friend 
written not long before the change, she confessed 
she had " gabbled and simpered long enough ; " 
but we do not know if the confession was made 
with as much sincerity as the occasion demanded. 
The immediate cause of her departure was an en- 
gagement with Horace Greeley to join the staff of 
the " Tribune," and she lived in his house so long 
as she remained in the United States. There is 
a fact to quiet mirth. Horace Greeley knew merit 
when he saw it. He knew good work and good 
writing, and his opinions upon the members of 
his staff were always full of matter. He has left 
it on record that the new contributor won his 
favour by her solid merit, by her terse and vigor- 
ous writing. At first their relation was one of 
friendly antagonism. Mr. Greeley himself tells 
us so, and that he kept his eye clear, resolute to 
resist the fascination which, he had heard, she 
exercised over her former friends. On her side 
she considered her employer " a man of plebeian 
habits, but with a noble heart, his abilities in his 



MARGARET FULLER 193 

own way great, and believing in hers to a surpris- 
ing extent." Therefore, they became great friends. 
After three years she was the one to whom Mr. 
Greeley wrote, when his little boy died: "Ah, 
Margaret, the world grows dark with us; you 
grieve, for Rome is fallen ; I mourn, for Pickie 
is dead." 

Miss Fuller was placed in charge of the literary 
department of the " Tribune," and whilst she held 
sway in that office she had occasion to deal with 
the writings, then coming out in rapid succession, 
of Emerson, Lowell, Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 
Carlyle, George Sand ; and it is in her critical 
analysis of them that she first reveals her power. 
One or two illustrations of her method will be 
enough. 

An illustrated edition of Mr. Longfellow's 
poems had just appeared, and it was reviewed by 
her. It is easy enough now to say and to see 
what she then saw and said, but it demanded in- 
sight to see and courage to say what was entirely 
missed by that generation : " Longfellow is arti- 
ficial and imitative. He borrows incessantly and 
mixes what he borrows, so that it has a hollow, 
second-hand sound. He has a love of the beauti- 
ful, and a fancy for what is large and manly, if 
not a full sympathy with it. His verse breathes 



194 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

at times much sweetness, and though imitative, 
he is not mechanical. Nature with him, whether 
human or external, is always seen through the 
windows of literature." 

Lowell got his dose too : " He is absolutely 
wanting in the true spirit and tone of poesy. 
His interest in the moral questions of the day has 
supplied the want of vitality in himself. His great 
facility at versification has enabled him to fill the 
ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound." 
There are fables for poets as well as fables for 
critics. 

Browning is introduced to the American public 
for the first time in " Bells and Pomegranates," 
and with singular fitness the reviewer was com- 
pelled to send to Boston for his poems, as they 
could not be obtained in New York. Miss Fuller 
recognized at once in Miss Barrett's poetry 
"vigour and nobleness of conception, depth 
of spiritual experience and command of classic 
allusion, the vision of a great poet, but little of 
his power." 

George Sand was at that time at the height of 
her fame, to some the female incarnation of evil, 
to others an inspired prophetess ; but this Yankee 
woman was not deceived : kk George Sand smokes. 
wears male attire, wishes to be addressed as mon 



MARGARET FULLER 195 

frere. Perhaps, if she found those who were as 
brothers indeed, she would not care whether she 
were brother or sister. Those who would reform 
the world must show that they do not speak in 
the heat of wild impulse; their lives must be 
unstained by passionate error, if they would not 
confound the fancies of a day with the requisi- 
tions of eternal good." Margaret Fuller was 
right. The world is yet unreformed, and it is 
not by George Sands or George Eliots that the 
work will be done. 

About this time, too, appeared her " Women 
in the Nineteenth Century." The edition was sold 
in a week, and eighty-five dollars were handed 
to her as her share. " This was a most speaking 
fact ; " that she could hear the voice, speaks for 
her growing, sense. The book enlarged her repu- 
tation and made her name known abroad. It 
proclaimed her opinion of the capacity of women 
for a wide activity and demanded an outlet for 
it : " Let them be sea-captains if they will." 

But her most formal work was a series of 
papers on "American Art and Literature." In 
the outset she sets herself right by disarming 
" critics who may accuse her of writing about a 
thing that does not exist." She accords to Pres- 
cott industry, the choice of valuable material, 



1% ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

the power of clear arrangement, with an absence 
of thought ; to Bancroft, leading thoughts by 
whose aid he groups his facts. There is the true 
doctrine of history. Bryant is placed at the head 
of the poets, though his genius is " neither fertile 
nor comprehensive." Irving, Cooper, and Miss 
Sedgwick are spoken of with " characteristic 
appreciation ; " and finally, the Magazine itself 
comes in for its share. " The style of story cur- 
rent in them is flimsy beyond any texture that was 
spun or dreamed of by the mind of man." It 
would be interesting to have her opinion of Haw- 
thorne, who it will be remembered declined at one 
time to dine with her at Mr. Bancroft's house. 

The way this young woman talks back at 
Carlyle proves her courage, good sense, and in- 
sight. " We shall not be sneered or stormed at," 
she says, and that, too, at the time when Carlyle 
was yet alive. " If he has become interested in 
Oliver or any other pet hyena, by studying his 
habits, is that any reason why we should admit 
him to our Pantheon ? He rails himself out of 
breath at the shortsighted, and yet sees scarce 
a step before him." 

Of Alfred de Vigny, she says : M To see and 
to tell with grace, often with dignity and pathos, 
what he sees is his proper vocation ; M of IV'rauger : 



MARGARET FULLER 197 

" his wit is so truly French in its lightness and 
sparkling feathery vivacity, that one like me, ac- 
customed to the bitterness of English tonics and 
Byronic wrath of satire, cannot appreciate him at 
once." Nor did Miss Fuller disdain poetry on 
her own account. Some of it is as good as some 
of George Eliot's, though this latter writer does 
not usually pack into a sonnet line more feet than 
the law demands, a matter about which Miss 
Fuller was not so particular. 

All this is good criticism, strong and keen, and 
its author cannot have been the absurd creature 
her glorifiers would have us believe. Even in New 
York they could not leave her alone. She was not 
allowed to visit Blackwell's Island without " shed- 
ding the balm of her presence upon the hardened 
and wretched inmates, because she came like the 
great powers of nature harmonizing with all the 
beauty of the soul or of the earth." This of 
course is rubbish. What these people said about 
their own inward state may have seemed to them 
true enough ; they were incapable of telling the 
truth about the common things of which truth 
can be told. 

Now that we know the nature of the person 
with whom we are dealing, we shall be able to 
estimate the value of the words which she employs. 



198 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

Words depend for their meaning upon the one 
who uses them. "When Carlyle said remorse, he 
meant regret ; when his wife spoke of the cruelties 
she endured, she merely referred to the ordinary 
inconveniences of the married state. Victor Hugo 
described Sainte-Beuve as an eagle, and a royal 
meteor ; but in France all writers are masters, and 
those who attain to any distinction are immortal. 
We find Tennyson charging his niece to reveal to 
the world how great a sacrifice he made, when at 
length he placed on his head the coronet which 
had been thrice pressed upon him and twice put 
away. Artists in colours are incapable of repre- 
senting with truthfulness the things that any one 
can see. Artists in words, as a rule, are unable to 
tell of a thing as it occurred, unless it be Thomas 
Campbell, who alone is remarkable for his fidelity 
to fact, as in his relation in verse of the founder- 
ing of a troop-ship. But when a literary artist 
attempts to reproduce in words his own mental 
processes, then it is obviously very hard to con- 
tradict him. 

Margaret Fuller set down on paper a relation 
of the impression made upon her mind by a man : 
which is to say she wrote a series of documents 
known as love-letters. Fortunately, most persons 
pass through that stage before they have attained 



MARGARET FULLER 199 

to the power of expression, and the emotion ex- 
pends itself in sighs, in secret verse, and in toss- 
ings to and fro. But she had arrived at complete 
fluency and produced a volume of correspondence 
which is peculiarly near being nonsense. The 
letters are addressed to a Hamburg Jew, Nathan 
by name, who died not many years ago, and they 
have only recently been made public, though their 
existence has always been known to those who 
were interested in such matters. One example 
will help to show the inconvenience of experi- 
encing the passion after the glory of youth is 
fled, or at any rate the folly of simulating it in 
the maturity of life. The Hebrew lover disap- 
pointed the lady by not coming to a concert of 
music at Horace Greeley's house, and the next 
day he received the following letter : 

" The shades and time of evening settled down 
upon me as dew upon the earth. You came not — 
And now I realize that soon will be the time when 
evening will come always, but you will come no 
more. "We shall meet in soul — but the living eye 
of love, that is in itself almost a soul, that will 
beam no more. O heaven, O God, or by what- 
soever name I may appeal, surely, surely, O All 
Causing, thou must be all sustaining, all fulfilling 
too. I, from thee sprung, do not feel forced to 



200 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

bear so much as one of these deep impulses in 
vain. Nor is it enough that the heavenly magic 
of its touch throws open all the treasure chambers 
of the universe, if these enchanted doors must 
close again. "Wilt thou prepare for me an image 
fair and grand enough of hope? Give that to 
man at large, but to me send some little talisman 
that may influence the secret heart. And let it 
have a diamond point that may pierce without any 
throb swells. I would not stifle one single note, 
only tune all sweet. My head aches still and I 
must lean it on the paper as I write, so the writ- 
ing goes all amiss. " 

As Mr. Birrell says of Hazlitt, we must be on 
our guard against the sham raptures of literary 
persons, since great gifts of expression always de- 
mand employment. At that very moment the fas- 
cinating Jew was preparing to sail for Germany. 

In 1846 Miss Fuller accomplished her desire to 
visit Europe. She sailed from New York on the 
old Cambria of the Canard Line. Pier biographer 
still pursues her, and finds her, upon the moment 
of landing in Liverpool, paying a visit to the 
Mechanics' Institute, and afterwards " expressing 
appreciation of the British Museum." The a 
in the Boston Athenaeum, about which we have 
heard so much, loomed large in those days. 



MARGARET FULLER 201 

The traveller visited Wordsworth at his home, 
and found " a reverend old man, clothed in black, 
and walking with cautious step along the level 
garden path." She met Dean Milman at the 
Martineaus', Dr. Chalmers and De Quincey in 
Edinburgh, and there saw the portrait of " hate- 
ful old John Knox, and his wife who was like 
him." 

During an excursion to the Highlands, Miss 
Fuller had a misadventure and passed the night 
on the hills in a Scottish mist, and was none the 
worse for it. This would appear to dispose of 
the fiction of her frail health. Eeturning to 
England, she was soon installed in London ; it 
was the London, and those were the days, of 
Dickens, Thackeray, Sidney Smith, Moore, Lord 
Brougham, the Duke of Wellington, and Car- 

lyle. 

Miss Fuller began in a small way by visiting 
Joanna Baillie, and then felt competent to pre- 
sent her letter of introduction from Emerson to 
Carlyle. It does not matter now what Margaret 
thought of Carlyle, though she did say two or 
three things that seem very probable ; it matters 
a great deal towards our enquiry what Carlyle 
thought of her, for he had some knowledge of 
women and knew a fool when he saw one. He 



202 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

has put it on record that he and Mrs. Carlyle 
held Miss Fuller in real regard, that he found 
in her papers " something greatly superior to all 
I knew before, in fact, the undeniable utterances 
(now first undeniable to me) of a true heroic 
mind, altogether unique as far as I know among 
the writing women of this generation, rare enough 
too, God knows, among the writing men. She is 
very narrow sometimes, but she is truly high. 
Honour to Margaret and more and more speed 
to her." Honour to Margaret, to the real Mar- 
garet, not the ridiculous precieuse of the Xew 
England coterie. 

Two other persons she knew before going to 
Paris : Mazzini intimately ; and casually, " a 
witty, French, flippant sort of a man, who told 
stories admirably, and served a good purpose 
by interrupting Carlyle's harangues.' ' This could 
be none other than George Henry Lewes. The 
meeting with Mazzini was a fateful one to her. 

In Paris Miss Fuller was not unknown, for 
translations of her social studies had appeared in 
the " Revue Independante." She was at once 
taken up by George Sand, and introduced to 
Chopin, with whom that illustrious moralist had 
formed an M alliance " — that, Sir Leslie Stephen 
believed to be the correct word to employ in such 



MARGARET FULLER 203 

cases. It is altogether likely that much which 
went on in that household was concealed from the 
short-sighted vision of this middle-aged Puritan 
maiden. It was no place for her — if we can 
trust Browning's description of the society which 
was to be encountered there : " the ragged red, 
diluted with the low theatrical ; men who worship 
George Sand a genou 5as, between an oath and 
an ejection of saliva." Artists resemble Calvin- 
ists in this respect alone, that they have a com- 
mon tendency to fall into the Antinomian heresy 
of John Agricola, and hold themselves superior 
to the obligations of the moral law ; of course, the 
mental process by which they arrive at this com- 
forting conclusion is not identical in each case. 
The great musician played to her, and Mickiewicz 
talked to her whilst the music was going on. She 
heard the debates in the Assembly and saw the 
Queen at a ball; also Leverrier, the discoverer 
of Neptune, " wandering about as if he had lost, 
not found, a planet." That is what might be 
called " smart." 

From all this it will appear that Miss Fuller 
was a person of some consideration in the highest 
literary circles of Europe. But we must not over- 
rate the importance of this. Literary people, as 
a rule, are ignorant of many things, and easily 



204 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

swayed one way or the other by influences of 
slight force. It may have been that they were 
carried away by wonder, not that Margaret Fuller 
could write so well, but that this outland stranger 
of unprepossessing appearance and nasal voice 
was a woman and could write at all — like Dr. 
Johnson when he saw the dancing bear. 

In May, 1847, Margaret Fuller arrived in 
Rome, having come by way of Marseilles, Genoa, 
and Naples. There she remained two months, 
and then proceeded northward by way of Perugia, 
Florence, Ravenna, and Venice, to Milan. From 
that place she visited the Italian lakes, went on 
to Switzerland, and returned to Milan early in 
September, and to Rome by way of Florence 
near the end of October. At Lake Como she 
enjoyed the society of the Marchesa Arconati 
Visconti, whom she had previously met in Flor- 
ence. The impression she made upon the accom- 
plished Italian is recorded in a letter from that 
lady to Emerson : 

" Je n'ai point rencontre, dans ma vie, de f emme 
plus noble, ayant autant de sympathie pour ses 
semblables, et dont Tesprit fut plus vivifiant. 
Je me suis tout de suite sentie attireo par elle. 
Quand je fis sa connaissance, j'ignorais que ce fut 
one femme reinarquable." 



MARGARET FULLER 205 

Though Miss Fuller had now been in Italy less 
than half a year, and that spent mostly in travel- 
ling, she had already gained the complete con- 
fidence and esteem of Young Italy, the revolu- 
tionary party, whose watchword was the unifica- 
tion of the Italian States into a republic. This 
intimacy was but natural, for a strong bond of 
sympathy had been established between her and 
Mazzini in London. Being interested in ideas 
herself, she enjoyed the company of these young 
radicals, and as she belonged to a republic, and 
as a republic was believed to have something to 
do with liberty, they had much in common. /In- 
asmuch as Miss Fuller's future was afterwards 
bound up with theirs, and as out of this union 
arose the tragedy of her life, it will be necessary 
to indicate briefly the posture of public affairs. 

At the collapse of the fabric which Napoleon 
had so painfully reared, the little Italian sover- 
eigns returned from their exile more resolute than 
ever in tyranny, with Austria approving of their 
reign of terror. Tyranny was met with con- 
spiracy, and revolt with vengeance. This state 
of affairs lasted till 1847. Most men were agreed 
that a change must come; there was no agree- 
ment as to what that change should be. Italy 
must be unified ; one party was for unity under 



206 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

republican forms, another party was in favour of 
a limited monarchy. Mazzini was for a republic, 
Cavour and Garibaldi put their trust in a king. 
The faith of Cavour and Garibaldi was afterwards 
justified, but only through much shedding of 
blood. The revolution in France, which drove 
Louis Philippe from the throne in February, 
1848, encouraged Mazzini and his friends. Some 
months previously, the miracle of all miracles 
had happened ; a gleam of political sense eman- 
ated from the papal throne. Pius IX declared 
himself a liberal ; he proclaimed a political am- 
nesty ; he organized a national guard, and began 
to form a constitution for the Roman State. 

Things looked promising for Mazzini and his 
friends, and Margaret Fuller was of their num- 
ber. Another of her friends was the Marchese 
Ossoli, a young Roman of twenty-eight, of a noble 
but impoverished house. In less than two months 
the pope had fled from Rome, and was breathing 
out threats of excommunication against his recent 
allies. In February, 1849, Rome was declared a 
republic under three dictators, with Mazzini at 
their head. A few days later the dictators escaped 
on board a British warship ; in April, the French 
were at the gates of Rome, and after a successful 
assault held the city for the pope. The dream 



MARGARET FULLER 207 

was at an end. Margaret Fuller had " played for 
a new stake and lost it." That was her view 
of the case as contained in a letter to Emerson, 
dated July 8, 1849. What was the nature of 
that " play " ? 

Shortly after her arrival in Rome, in the spring 
of 1847, Miss Fuller, on the evening of Holy 
Thursday, went to vespers at Saint Peter's with 
some friends. The party became separated and 
she was at a loss what to do. " Presently a young 
man of gentlemanly address came up to her, and 
begged, if she were seeking any one, that he might 
be permitted to assist her." At last it became 
evident beyond a doubt that the party could no 
longer be there, and as it was then quite late and 
the crowd all gone, they went into the piazza to 
find a carriage. There were no carriages, so 
Margaret was compelled to walk with her stranger 
friend the long distance between the Vatican and 
the Corso. At her door they parted, and Mar- 
garet, finding her friends already at home, related 
the adventure. This is Mrs. Story's account. 
This chance acquaintance was the Marchese 
Ossoli. Within a few weeks he made an offer of 
marriage, which was declined, and Miss Fuller 
left for the North. They met again in the follow- 
ing November, the offer was renewed, and within 



208 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

a few weeks the pair were married. When, where, 
or by whom, we do not know to this day. 

" I have heard that from the beginning," says 
Emerson, " Margaret Fuller idealized herself as 
a sovereign. She told a friend that she early saw 
herself to be intellectually superior to those 
around her, that for years she dwelt upon the idea 
that she was not her parents' child, but an 
European princess confided to their care." Here, 
then, was an opportunity ready at hand for realiz- 
ing this very un-American ideal. If the revolu- 
tion had succeeded, as seemed not at all unlikely 
to the revolutionists, she would have come pretty 
near being a " European princess " — at any rate 
she would have been the first lady in the land, and 
that is closer than one usually comes to the real- 
ization of one's childish fancies. 

This is not offered as the whole explanation of 
Miss Fuller's conduct — the motives for any mar- 
riage are never very simple — but it is a pretty 
good guess at her central thought. All we know 
of the Marchese is entirely to his credit, and it is 
altogether probable that Miss Fuller, " wearied 
with the over-intellection and restless aspiration 
of the accomplished New Englander of that time, 
found in the simple geniality of the Italian na- 
ture all the charm and novelty of contrast." Let 



MARGARET FULLER 209 

us hasten to add that no word ever escaped her 
or her friends, that would indicate the least re- 
gret for her hasty action. 

The action was hasty. In May, 1847, let us 
repeat, she arrived in Eome for the first time, 
and remained only two months. She was back 
again in Eome at the end of October, and her 
child was born on the 5th of September follow- 
ing. That would be considered hasty in Ameri- 
can society in these days at any rate. 

The central fact in the life of Margaret Fuller 
is, as in the life of most women, that she married 
and became a mother, and it made a correspond- 
ing noise. The whole proceeding was perfectly 
regular, natural, and simple. She gives us a 
straightforward and truthful account of the se- 
quence of events, which is entirely convincing 
until her friends begin to supply evidence upon 
a subject on which no evidence was needed. That 
makes us ask, not what they say, but what they 
can prove. 

During the winter in Eome after the child was 
born, when her trouble was sore upon her, the 
Marchesa, as she now was, sent for Mrs. Story, 
wife of William Wetmore Story, the sculptor, 
and confided the " secret " to her. She also gave 
to her confidante certain papers and parchment 



210 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

documents to keep, in view of her death, which 
she feared was impending. Mrs. Story, with 
laudable self-abnegation, declined to read the 
papers, save one or two, though she had perfect 
liberty to do so. We could now wish that she 
had read them all, and informed us of her re- 
searches, or else kept absolutely quiet about the 
matter. 

At the time of Mr. Higginson's writing, he 
had before him Mrs. Story's original letter, and 
on the strength of it states that Margaret showed 
to Mrs. Story the certificate of her marriage with 
Ossoli. This same letter had been published long 
before in the Memoirs. All that Mrs. Story tells 
in the letter is, that, at the time of handing over 
the packet, they read together a document written 
in Latin on a piece of parchment. The utmost 
she claims is that it was a certificate given by a 
priest to the effect that Angelo Eugene Ossoli — 
the name of the child was Angelo Eugene Philip 
— was the legal heir to whatever fortune and title 
should come to his father. To this was affixed 
his seal, with those of the other witnesses, and the 
Ossoli " crest " was drawn in full upon the paper. 
This is the relation, and this is the document to 
which Mr. Higginsou refers as a marriage certi- 
ficate, with Mrs. Story's original letter before 



MARGARET FULLER 211 

him. If this be offered as evidence, then it is fair 
to say it is no evidence at all. Mrs. Story prob- 
ably could not read Latin, especially the Latin 
likely to be written by an Italian priest of those 
days ; the document, according to her showing, 
could not have been a marriage certificate, for 
the name of the heir is not usually specified in 
such writings; the "crest" drawn in full upon 
the paper does not increase its authenticity, 
and the witnesses were witnesses — to what ? 

When the crisis was past, the papers were 
returned to the Marchesa, and were lost in the 
final disaster. In her own writings, so far as 
published up to this time, Margaret assigns no 
date to her marriage, though she probably gave 
the details in a "little book" which perished 
with her. Her friends conclude, on purely physi- 
ological grounds, that it took place on or before 
December 5, 1847. Therein lies the penalty of 
all secret marriages. 

The motives for keeping the marriage a secret 
are perfectly obvious. The old Marchese Ossoli 
was about to die and the patrimony to be divided. 
He had three sons, one employed in the Papal 
Court as Secretary of the Privy Council, one as 
a member of the Guard ; the third and youngest 
was on the side of the Ke volution; he was a 



212 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

Catholic, married in secret to a Protestant ; the 
courts, civil and ecclesiastic, were in the hands of 
his enemies. Above all, the success of his cause 
was not yet assured. 

The situation of the woman was pitiable. Mar- 
ried in secret, and secrecy in such cases carries 
shame ; without a friend to share her trouble, in 
the midst of the alarms of war, her husband's life 
in peril, she retired to the mountains of Rieta in 
poverty and solitude, and there endured the curse 
of Eve and inherited the blessing. In seven weeks 
the brave New England woman was back in 
Rome, and spent the momentous winter of 1848 
in the city, with occasional visits to Rieta, where 
she had left her child in the hands of attendants 
who proved both cruel and treacherous. In April 
came the horrors of the siege ; long days and 
nights in hospitals filled with wounded and fever- 
stricken, her husband at his post of danger on the 
walls, and she at times by his side. There was the 
real Margaret Fuller, the Puritan woman in her 
New England heroism and austerity. 'By the first 
of July all was at an end ; at an end, too, all 
foolish dreams of unreal greatness. Then she 
wrote the whole story to her mother. 

The friends of Margaret Ossoli were naturally 
much surprised, but most of them were too well 



MARGARET FULLER 213 

bred to manifest it. Her mother sent her words 
of comfort and expressions of endearment. The 
Marchesa Arconati loved her the more, " now that 
we can sympathize as mothers." To Mr. Story, 
who appears not to have received the secret from 
his wife, she wrote, " Moral writers cannot exag- 
gerate the dangers and plagues of keeping 
secrets ; " and she had brotherly love in return. 
There was at this time a large colony of her fel- 
low countrymen in Italy, for we have heard her 
desiring to be delivered from the sound of the 
English language ; and from them she received 
every consideration. At home, she complains, 
there was some meddling curiosity. Her letters, 
written during the period when the marriage was 
yet unacknowledged, have a curious interest, par- 
ticularly those addressed to Emerson. They are 
singularly truthful and sincere, and yet disclose 
nothing. 

Notwithstanding the loss of the intellectual 
riches of New England, those days of Italian 
poverty were Margaret's happiest days. In a let- 
ter to her sister, the wife of William Ellery Chan- 
uing, she says : "In my child I find satisfaction 
for the first time to the deep wants of my heart." 
She dwells upon the purity and simple strength 
of her husband's character. "He is capable of 



214 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

sacred love ; he showed it to his father, to Rome, 
to me ; now he loves his child in the same way." 
To her mother she wrote : " Of all that is con- 
tained in books he is entirely ignorant, yet he 
has excellent practical sense, a very sweet temper 
and great native refinement. I have never suf- 
fered a pain that he could relieve ; his devotion 
when I am ill is to be compared only with yours." 
This is not a bad assemblage of qualities in a 
husband, and her testimony is confirmed by all 
the Americans in Italy who knew him, Mr. and 
Mrs. Story, Lewis Cass, W. H. Hurlbut, Horace 
Sumner, Mozier, Chapman, and the Greenoughs. 

The family remained nearly a year in Italy 
after the fall of Rome, chiefly in Florence. Of 
this halcyon time Mr. Hurlbut, consul at Turin, 
gives rather a free account. He admires their 
domestic life without stint, and gives a pretty 
picture of Ossoli, seated by his wife, dressed in 
a dark brown coat, reading some patriotic book. 
Mr. Hurlbut always found him at home, save 
when a number of American and English visitors 
came in. On those occasions he used to take his 
leave and go to the cafe, but we must not blame 
him too severely for that. 

Neither Margaret nor her husband, nor both 
together, possessed the six hundred dollars a year 






MARGARET FULLER 215 

necessary for living in Italy, and as all avenues 
of employment were closed to him on account of 
his birth and politics, the pair turned their faces 
to America, where the wife with rare courage 
proposed to take up the burden on behalf of her 
own family, which she had borne with such fidelity 
for her father's. 

From motives of economy, they sailed from 
Leghorn in the merchant ship Elizabeth, a barque 
commanded by Captain Hasty ; it was the 17th 
of May, 1850, before the ship got under weigh. 
Before Gibraltar was reached, the captain lay 
dead of the small-pox, and on the ocean voyage 
the child contracted the disease, but recovered 
handsomely. 

On Tuesday, the 18th of July, the Elizabeth 
was off Navesink on the Jersey coast ; the weather 
thick, the wind from south of east. To make a 
good offing and in the morning run down before 
the wind, past Sandy Hook, the mate, who was 
now in command, stood to the east of north, sail- 
ing well in the wind. By nine o'clock a stiff 
breeze was blowing ; it grew into a gale, and by 
midnight the weather was very heavy. The Eliza- 
beth was now under reefed lower sails and head- 
sails, everything aloft made snug, and all hands 
on deck. The gale increased to such a hurricane 



21G ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

as had not been known for years, and what with 
wind and what with tide, the master of the Eliza- 
beth overran his course, drifting to leeward all 
the time, and piled up his ship about four in 
the morning on Fire Island, the grave of many 
another good craft before and since. The main 
and mizzen were cut away, but in spite of the 
relief the bow held hard ; the stern swung round 
till the barque was broadside and hard aground, 
and the seas made a clear breach over her. The 
heavy cargo of marble went through the bilge, 
and now the Elizabeth was at the mercy of the 
sea. Between-decks everything was awash, and 
the few passengers were huddled together to wind- 
ward. By daybreak they gained the shelter of 
the forecastle and saw the shore not a cable's 
length away, with wreckers and their wagons 
ready for salvage, but not for rescue. By noon, 
eight hours after the stranding, a lifeboat arrived 
from Fire Island, which was less than four miles 
away, but not the slightest attempt was made to 
launch it. Davis, the mate, behaved most credit- 
ably, according to his own story. He devised 
a plan of escape and proved its efficacy by swim- 
ming ashore in company with the widow of his 
late captain ; all but four of the crew also prow. I 
its feasibility; the plan was primitive, though 



MARGARET FULLER 217 

practicable, and yet not the slightest attempt was 
made to launch the lifeboat into a sea in which 
men could swim with safety. By three o'clock 
the cabin had gone adrift, the stern settled down, 
the forecastle filled, and the refugees were driven 
to the open deck, where they were soon huddled 
about the foremast. Presently this went by the 
board, carrying the decks away. Two remaining 
members of the crew swam ashore and two were 
drowned; the steward seized the child and 
plunged in; their bodies were washed ashore a 
few minutes later. Margaret and her husband 
went down together. The mate said it was their 
own fault; that is what he might have been 
expected to say. Their bodies were never recov- 
ered. When the lifeboatmen were derided for 
their cowardice, they excused themselves by 
saying they did not know there was any one of 
importance on board. 

The story of life-saving on the coast of the 
United States goes back to 1786, when Noyes, 
the blind physician of Boston, organized the 
Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Mas- 
sachusetts. The National Congress laid its para- 
lyzing hand upon the movement in 1849, by 
passing an appropriation of ten thousand dollars 
for the work ; until 1876, the service was put to 



218 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

the basest uses by the politicians, and during 
that unhappy period more vessels than the Eliza- 
beth were sacrificed to the greed of the crippled 
and degenerate proteges of the politicians. 

This was the end of the tragedy of Margaret 
Fuller's life. The real tragedy would have 
begun, had she had to commence again her life 
with a foreign husband in New England. 

If we possessed only the record of Margaret 
Fuller's life from the time she left Boston and 
came under the sane influence of the editor of 
the " Tribune," until its untimely end, we should 
miss much of the pathology of hysteria as mani- 
fested in herself, in other women, and in the men 
amongst their friends who were like women ; but 
this record would show her to be entirely admir- 
able. This normal life covered less than five 
years. She died at the age of forty. George 
Eliot was older than that when her first notable 
work appeared ; Madame de Stael was forty-one, 
and George Sand nearly as old. 

It is useless to speculate upon what Margaret 
Fuller might have accomplished had life been 
spared to her. Nothing is more futile than such 
speculations. If Kingsley had ceased writing at 
thirty-six, and Mr. Kipling had succumbed to his 
attack of pneumonia in New York, their names 



MARGARET FULLER 219 

would be held in mysterious reverence ; and the 
public would busy itself with wonder as to the 
nature of their future accomplishments and with 
lamentations at their untimely fate. The public 
mind would surely have been wrong ; probably it 
is wrong also in surmising that Margaret Fuller 
might have accomplished something. 

Poor Chatterton understood the import of this. 
Sad indeed his fate, but sadder still, had he lived 
to see his pure stream stagnant in the sand, or 
contracted into a brawling brook. 

All we can say, to conclude the matter, is that 
the personality of Margaret Fuller was a romantic 
one, that she and her friends were in the habit 
of talking romantically about it, that is, without 
enquiring too clearly into the truth of what they 
said ; that romantic things really did occur, and 
that, with the irony usual in such cases, nothing 
came of it after all. 



IV 
WALT WHITMAN 



WALT WHITMAN 

In the year 1855, a thin quarto volume was pub- 
lished in Brooklyn. It was entitled " Leaves of 
Grass," and the author's name was given as 
Walt Whitman. The little book contained about 
a dozen poems, or " pieces," as the contents were 
designated by the writer, and it was ill received 
by the public to whom it was addressed. 

Most persons who are capable of forming an 
opinion upon such matters are now agreed that 
" Leaves of Grass " was the most important work 
in poetry which had appeared in the United 
States up to that time, and that the author, Walt 
Whitman, is a poet in very truth, with all the 
rights and privileges pertaining to that order. 
Indeed, there are some who hold that he is the 
greatest of American poets ; that is, if one poet 
can with any degree of justness be compared with 
another. 

This question of the relative importance of 
poets, it is unnecessary to discuss, even if it were 
possible to arrive at a decision in such a case. 
The present business is to enquire how it was 



224 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

that the generation to which Whitman spoke 
was so blind to the beauty of his poetry, and so 
insensible to the significance of his philosophical 
speculations, as to greet him with execration or 
laughter. This task will involve some consider- 
ation of the poetry itself, some estimate of the 
personality of the writer, and obviously, some 
comment upon the people amongst whom he 
lived. 

When a new method of literary presentation is 
put forward, those persons whose business it is to 
inform and direct the public mind have legiti- 
mate employment, but the effect of their criti- 
cism is merely for the time being. A critic is 
always correct in his judgement of cases about 
which it does not matter much whether he is 
right or wrong. In the unusual case, which does 
matter, he is sure to be wrong, because the prin- 
ciples by which ordinarily he comes to a conclu- 
sion fail to apply. He sees a man who is off the 
beaten path, and by all the rules and directions 
that man has lost his way. The critics must go 
safely in the middle of the road. They have au 
office to perform and a reputation to sustain: 
the eulogists are under no necessity beyond 
gratifying their own good-nature. 

All things pertaining to literature will right 



WALT WHITMAN 225 

themselves if they be given time. The value of 
all discussion, whether it be in the public speech 
of the political assembly or in printed words, lies 
in this, namely, that the matter is kept in a con- 
dition of flux until it is entirely ready to assume 
a permanent form. Most literature and all crit- 
icism is merely talk about things. What was 
said of Whitman — the railing of his enemies, 
the adulation of his friends — is of value only as 
an expression of the current thought of the time ; 
it had no influence in shaping the estimate in 
which he will finally be held. If men do not un- 
derstand what a poet says, no amount of comment 
will enlighten them. Poets have perceptions, but 
no matter how great their capacity for resolving 
those perceptions into words, they have little 
power of compelling others to see immediately as 
they see. The most they can do is to persuade 
men to open their eyes. In time, somehow, men's 
eyes do get opened, and they see things which 
the poet saw long before. Then they say that the 
thing is true, and that the man is a poet. The 
value of criticism, then, is that it reflects contem- 
porary thought, or rather discloses the main drift 
of it. At its worst, it reveals the writer of it ; at 
its best, it elucidates the opinions which were held 
by the generation for which it assumes to speak. 



226 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

This, in the main, is true of all poetry and 
of all comment upon it. De Quincey, who was 
one of Wordsworth's earliest friends and ad- 
mirers, had occasion to quote one of his splen- 
did passages, which contains the noble descrip- 
tion : 

There, towers begirt 
With battlements, that on their restless fronts 
Bore stars. 

Yet De Quincey felt constrained to refer to 
Wordsworth merely as "a great modern poet," 
and would not formally mention his name. " I 
shrunk with disgust," he said, "from making 
any sentence of mine the occasion of an explosion 
of vulgar malice against him." Burns's poems, 
when they first appeared, were, in the judgement 
of the leading authority of the English-speaking 
world, " nothing more than disgusting nonsense 
written in an unknown tongue." To the same 
reviewers the " Ancient Mariner " was " a rhap- 
sody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence ; " 
" Christabel " was rude and unfeatured ; M Tin- 
tern Abbey " was " tinctured with gloomy, nar- 
row, and unsociable ideas of seclusion from the 
commerce of the world." The only world which 
these reviewers knew anything about was tin 4 
mechanical world of their own Adam Smith. 



WALT WHITMAN 227 

Utopia and Paradise were less desirable to them 
than a well-contrived iron mill, with its due 
observance of the eternal relations between the 
various kinds of capital, and proper division of 
labour, with due profits upon its stock. 

In the case of Walt Whitman, too, the wise 
men were singularly unanimous in their judge- 
ment ; and as it afterwards turned out, they were 
mainly in the wrong. They were also wilfully, 
and, upon the whole, viciously harsh. They were, 
as usual, under the domination of their time ; yet 
in the end, when we understand all the circum- 
stances of the case, we shall not blame them, any 
more than we blame the leaders of public opinion 
upon that celebrated occasion which arose in 
Judaea. Indeed, there is something worthy of 
admiration in the conduct of any set of Pharisees 
who resist a doctrine which they believe to be 
false. To the generation which lived half a cen- 
tury ago, Walt Whitman was nothing more than 
the son of a carpenter, born of themselves, a man 
who spent his life amongst the toilers, chiefly 
where they suffered most ; a man who uttered a 
few sayings which did not look like poetry when 
they were printed in a book. So he was reviled 
by the many and blessed by the few ; and these 
few in their turn reviled his enemies. To complete 



228 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

the relation, this poet endured great suffering of 
mind and body, and died as the result of that 
suffering, when he was a little past the middle 
of life. Unfortunately, though he remained as 
an amiable presence, he was not buried for long 
years after. 

The burden of the complaint against the poetry 
of Whitman was not that it was strange and 
queer and unmetrical, without good sense or 
agreeable sound, but that it was unclean. We 
are, therefore, compelled to examine the state of 
mind of the people who laid this charge, as well 
as to consider the poetry upon which the charge 
was founded. 

It is the fashion to speak lightly of the early 
Puritans who settled in New England ; to explain 
the narrowness of their lives by their hard en- 
vironment; and to account for their insensibility 
by the lack of stimulation. If their lives were 
narrow, they were lofty ; if they were insensible 
to what appeals to us in art and literature, they 
had ideals of their own, which so far transcended 
the things of this world that art and literature 
were not worth bothering about in comparison 
with them. To attain to a knowledge of God was 
the end of their striving, and in the struggle 
everything that we are making such a fuss about 



WALT WHITMAN 229 

was trampled under foot. When a man gets it 
into his head that by searching he can find out 
God, he cares very little for the flower in the 
crannied wall, much less for the pictures of it or 
for the rhymes which the poet makes. Of course, 
it is not pretended that the infertility of the coun- 
try to-day in the various forms of art is due to a 
preoccupation with the things of God. The utmost 
that is urged is that the bent of the people in 
the early days was toward theology and away 
from art, and that as time went on they finally 
attained to an attitude of strict neutrality or 
indifference to both. 

The period preceding the events which led up 
to the Civil War was, in many respects, the queer- 
est in the annals of the United States ; and the 
people who lived at that time could not know 
that there was a poet in their midst speaking for 
a generation which was not yet born. There was 
very little value set upon artistic expression of 
any kind, and but slight discrimination between 
what was good and what was bad in any form 
of art. Emerson was ranked above Montaigne 
as an essayist, and even the pretension to an 
acquaintanceship with Longfellow was enough to 
make a man's reputation. The people were yet 
under the shadow of their ancestral tree. They 



230 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

did not care whether any given poetry was good or 
bad. They had no interest whatever in poetry. 
They knew that it was wrong to hold their fellow 
men in bondage, and they were resolute to put an 
end to that form of evil at least. 

Every age and every community has its own 
notions in a general way, as to what is right 
and what is wrong. In Scotland, at one time, 
unsoundness of theological doctrine was an 
evidence of inherent viciousness ; cattle-lifting, 
a national, and, under ordinary circumstances, 
praiseworthy characteristic. In the early commu- 
nities of the Western States no great stress was 
laid upon correctness of belief, but a good deal 
was made of the stealing of horses. To Cellini, 
murder was a whimsical pastime ; to a publican, 
the theft of his pewter pots is the ultimate expres- 
sion of human depravity. 

The New England community inherited such 
a hatred of sin as a theological entity that they 
were incapable of estimating the relative heinous- 
ness of vices so far apart as piracy and sleeping in 
church. The commoner forms of wickedness, Sab- 
bath-breaking, profanity, and uncleanness, were 
regarded together as equally deserving of God's 
wrath and curse. But they had very especial and 
very erroneous views upon the moral significance 



WALT WHITMAN 231 

of those acts which have to do with the propaga- 
tion of the species ; and to this day the New 
England mind has not rid itself of the conviction 
that drinking and drabbing are worse than lying 
and stealing. This state of mind at length came 
to colour their whole view of life, to govern their 
estimate of conduct, and influence their judgement 
of art. 

Foreign observers of American life are filled 
with wonder at the fixedness of this attitude to- 
ward conduct and life. They have seen a man, 
dishonest in his relations with his fellow men, 
with no religious convictions, or false to those 
which he pretended to hold, recreant to the public 
trust which had been confided to him, cynical 
in his friendships and violent in his enmities, 
yet observing the conventions in respect to his 
domestic affairs — and he was advanced to still 
higher place. 

The invariable result of a narrow way of life is 
a wrong perception between good and evil, and a 
failure to recognize the relative and negative value 
of the various forms of wickedness which prevail 
in the world. Any given bodily action is in itself 
neither right nor wrong. It is right or wrong, 
only when taken with the whole contexture of 
events of which it forms a part. Every vice is 



232 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

the counterpart of some virtue. In a narrow 
community the virtue and the vice are confused, 
and the confusion results in prudery, which 
quickly passes into hypocrisy. A moderate con- 
sumption of alcohol is confounded with debauch- 
ery; an enquiring mind is evidence of atheism 
and proof of vicious living. Worst perversion of 
all : the dominant passion of humanity is regarded 
as being at one with libidinousness. 

Thoreau, when he heard of Whitman, said, 
" He is democracy." Lincoln, when he saw the 
poet, cried out, " He is a man." But the mass of 
the people were only dully conscious that he had 
offended against the dearest traditions of New 
England life. Whitman lived in New York, it is 
true ; but the standards by which he was judged 
were New England standards. The rule of life 
which he transgressed was the Boston rule. From 
the point of view which prevailed in New York, it 
did not matter that a man, even were he a poet, 
should have a ruddy face and wear big whiskers, 
that he should cross the ferry in the pilot-house 
of the steamer, that he should ride on the top of 
an omnibus and talk with low people, even tread 
with bare feet the shore of Long Island, or swim 
naked in its waters. 

The poets of Boston did none of these things. 



WALT WHITMAN 233 

They kept out of the rain and the sun. They found 
enjoyment in things which Whitman disdained. 
In a letter from James Russell Lowell to Miss 
Emelyn Eldredge we have some indication of 
what the great ones of Boston found entertaining : 
" I, yesterday, returned from Salem, where we 
had spent Fast Week. We had a very good time 
indeed, doing, of course, just what we pleased. 
We waltzed, or acted charades, or enjoyed tete-a- 
tetes on the stairs or in the library, or joked, or 
did something, all the time. An ingenious friend, 
who was patient enough to count the number of 
puns made in the space of twenty minutes, found 
them to be seventy-five, or a little more than three 
in a minute. The recoil from such a state of mind 
is either into stupidity or a greater degree of non- 
sense." Judging from some publications which 
appeared about this time, it would seem that this 
final observation of Lowell was probably just — 
that such diversions are apt to lead to stupidity 
and nonsense on the part of those who indulge in 
them. 

Nor are we left without knowledge of the kind 
of jokes which passed current in the community, 
scattered, as they are, through the pages of letters 
which have been so ruthlessly made public within 
the past five years. When William Wetmore 



234 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

Story was in Italy, Lowell wrote to him to en- 
quire : " What do you do for cigars? I know that 
the Virginian nepenthe is so much esteemed there, 
that one of the popular oaths is Per Baccof I 
know that Vesuvius smokes, but do the people 
generally?" Lowell did not care whether the 
Italians used tobacco or not ; he was only anxious 
to find an opening for his little joke. The incident 
is typical. The men of his time and class cared 
only for certain aspects of life ; for them " litera- 
ture" was the thing. 

Mr. Story, in a letter to Lowell, dated from 
Boston in 1855, bemoans that his fellow country- 
men " have little blood and few sensual tempta- 
tions." We may dissent at once from this impli- 
cation, that the main office of the blood is to 
minister to sensuality ; yet it is significant that 
such was the connection in the New England 
mind. To Whitman this spirit in the blood was 
a noble creation for a divinely appointed and 
glorious purpose. He magnified it and made it 
honourable ; the wise men of New England strove 
to put it underfoot ; or rather, the thing died of 
inanition, and they took credit to themselves for 
having destroyed it. 

We may accept the statement of Story as 
being correct, and we can find a natural explana- 






WALT WHITMAN 235 

tion of the phenomenon in the facts of physiology. 
If we were more willing to follow the practice of 
that Judaean king of perfect heart, and seek unto 
the physicians for information upon these deep 
matters, instead of laying them to the charge of 
the Devil without further investigation, we should 
have safer grounds for procedure. A good physi- 
cian and great physiologist has written in his 
book : " Idleness is the mother of lechery. There 
are other altars than those of Venus upon which 
a young man may light fires. He may practise 
at least two of the five means by which, as the 
physician Eondibilis counselled Panurge, carnal 
concupiscence may be cooled and quelled — hard 
work of body and mind." 

From the time of the earliest settlement, the 
inhabitants of New England had hard work of 
body in their endeavour to subsist ; they had hard 
work of mind in their endeavour — a vain one 
as it afterwards proved — to discover the whole 
purpose of God. In addition to this, there was 
no organized class of idle rich or idle poor, and 
so the people were unfamiliar with the vice of 
uncleanness. To them it was a hideous monster. 
Hatred of the vice caused a hatred of hearing 
about the normal circumstances of which this 
vice is the counterpart. 



236 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

The chief end of man, notwithstanding a great 
authority to the contrary, is to propagate his 
species. The present writer has been told, by one 
of the many philosophers who love to meditate in 
secret, that life is the condition of matter which 
enables an organism to perpetuate itself; and 
that the eternal purpose of the Universe is to 
endow matter with the capacity for sentient en- 
joyment. The whole fabric of creation is indis- 
solubly bound up with this natural propensity, 
and with it the passion for maternity. As one 
decays, the other dies. Numerical diminution 
of the race and individual decadence go together. 
That is the curse of Eve. But we are not speak- 
ing of present times. The history of all society is 
determined by the attitude which it adopts to- 
ward this fundamental conception : and to come 
to the matter in hand, it is only in communities 
where a correct view prevails that fulness of life 
is found, and artistic expression, the flower of life, 
is possible. 

The Puritans held other views as to the mission 
of the race, either adopting Saint Paul's convic- 
tion that the end of the human species, as such, 
was at hand ; or Calvin's belief, that if any indivi- 
dual of the species were to escape eternal punish- 
ment, it would be but by the skin of his teeth ; or 



* WALT WHITMAN 237 

the judgement of Jonathan Edwards that the balk 
of mankind was reserved for burning. Obviously, 
a species with so gloomy an outlook before it was 
not worth reproducing, and men had a ready 
means of bringing to naught the sinister purposes 
which they attributed to Providence. Yet Ed- 
wards himself had ten sisters and eleven children, 
which is a singular illustration of the slight degree 
in which the dominant passion of humanity is in- 
fluenced by extraneous beliefs. Whitman's career, 
then, was in the nature of a revolt, and we should 
fail to understand it, had we not, at some length, 
gone into the matter against which he rebelled. 

However much the literary coterie of New Eng- 
land might pretend to be satisfied with their en- 
vironment, in reality they were not so. They dis- 
closed continually their discontent in the letters 
which they were incessantly writing to each other. 
To return again to the correspondence of William 
Wetmore Story. In a letter to Lowell about 
Allston, it is asserted that he " starved spiritually 
— there was nothing congenial about him — he 
was stunted by the cold winds of that fearful 
Cambridgeport — the heart grows into stone — 
there is no hearty love of anything." This was 
in Boston. In more fashionable places it was no 
better. When Mr. Story was in Newport, he 



238 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM * 

gave some account of the condition of affairs, 
which he observed at a meeting of the aristocracy 
in that resort of society : "I did not see a hand- 
some face — all wan and worn and haggard. 

There was a famous Miss , Jewish in style, 

hollow -cheeked, with two drum-sticks for arms, 
broken, and sharpened off at the elbows. To her 
immense attention is paid, because she is rich. 
All the talk here is about dollars, how much 
money this and that one has got, and a dreary 
and monotonous thing it is to hear it so con- 
stantly." All this concerns merely the dryness 
and dreariness of New England life. I have re- 
frained of set purpose from making any mention 
of the wickedness of it, though the letter-writers 
of the time manifest no such reticence. In a let- 
ter to Lowell from Story, the sculptor adds to the 
bloodlessness and the absence of sensual tempta- 
tions the fatal words, "but they do not resist 
what temptations they have." This appears to 
me to be merely ill-natured, though Mr. Story 
does illustrate his saying by some shocking gossip 
about the very delicate matter of cuckoldry — to 
employ an old phrase. This, then, was society, 
and Whitman had no social ambitions. He had 
no desire to enter it. He was a force. He moved 
in his own lines. He was untrammelled. Indeed, 



WALT WHITMAN 239 

there is a rumour to the same effect current in 
the frontier stations of India in connection with 
Mr. Kipling. That is the one thing which society- 
will not tolerate — a lack of social ambition, an 
outsidedness of all cliques. 

Walt Whitman was born free from the con- 
ventions, good or bad, which hedged in his fellow 
countrymen. He had the virtues inherent in the 
New England stock and was free from many of its 
vices. His first American progenitor came from 
England to Connecticut in 1635, in the True Love, 
a ship only a little less famous than the Abigail 
or the Mayflower. The family remained in New 
England for two generations, then migrated to 
Long Island, in the State of New York, and was 
established there for four generations before the 
poet was born. He came from a mingled blood. 
His mother's people were Van Yelsors, and he 
obtained a Celtic strain from his maternal grand- 
mother, who was a Williams. The occupation 
of the family is also worthy of note. The Whit- 
mans, and the Van Velsors, too, farmed their 
own lands, raised horses and cattle ; and some of 
the younger members of the family, with Amer- 
ican versatility, turned to seafaring, carpentry, or 
other means of livelihood. Born anew in New 
England, nourished in New York, enriched by 



240 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

fresh strains of blood, ennobled by independence, 
self-reliant through success in varied occupations, 
such a family was well qualified for the produc- 
tion of a free man. 

Walt Whitman, then, was " well begotten, and 
raised by a perfect mother," and soon proved him- 
self worthy of his high birth and training. He 
was the second of nine children, and was usually 
called Walt to distinguish him from his father, 
whose name also was Walter. The qualities in 
the Whitman family, which have been already 
enumerated, manifested themselves early in this 
boy, and at the age of thirteen he was competent 
to take his place in the great world. He began by 
learning to set type, an occupation which has been 
peculiarly fertile of great men. A thirteen-year- 
old typesetter in a modern printing-office is usually 
a product of domestic necessity. In those days an 
American-born boy took to work as naturally as 
English children of the same age obtained a com- 
mand of men in the army or navy. The printer's 
case soon lost its interest, and he forsook it in 
order to teach a school. It was not long before 
he was back in the world again, writing for news- 
papers and setting the type, and at nineteen he be- 
gan editing a paper for himself. Then he removed 
to New York, where he remained for ten years, 



WALT WHITMAN 241 

setting type, printing, editing, writing, spending 
summers in the country at farm work, speaking 
at debating societies and political assemblies ; in 
short, earning his living, and living in any way 
that amused and interested him. 

Whitman now knew the world in so far as it 
was contained in New York ; but he wished to 
know more. Being then about thirty years of age, 
he began a slow journey with his brother through 
the Middle and Southern States, and reached New 
Orleans. He returned by the Western States as 
far north as Canada, and, making a wide circuit, 
returned to New York after an absence of two 
years. He had seen the great American people at 
work and was meditating upon what it meant ; and 
whilst so doing, he continued writing and editing, 
building, buying, and selling houses ; but " being 
in danger of getting rich," he abandoned these 
lucrative if absorbing employments. 

The poet's education was now complete, and it 
bore fruit in this little book of twelve pieces. It 
was printed at the house of Andrew and James 
Kowe, corner of Fulton and Cranberry streets, 
Brooklyn. Whitman himself assisted in setting 
the types, so that the strange arrangement of the 
lines is not the fault of the proof-reader or printer, 
as many alleged at the time of publication. 



242 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

Whitman had seen life at first hand, he was 
now to look death in the face. In 1862 the news 
came that his brother had been wounded at the 
battle of Fredericksburg, and he started for 
the camp on the Rapahannock. After caring for 
his brother, he joined the hospital corps, and 
assisted in conveying the wounded to Washing- 
ton. There he remained for three years, min- 
istering to the sick soldiers in the hospitals, 
supporting himself in any way he could, chiefly 
by writing letters to the newspapers. Then he fell 
ill, and after a short visit to his home returned to 
the hospitals. About the close of the war he was 
appointed to a clerk's place in the Department 
of the Interior, and was afterwards transferred 
to the office of the Attorney- General, where he 
became so efficient as to earn a salary of sixteen 
hundred dollars a year. In 1873 he was stricken 
with paralysis ; he removed to Camden, New 
Jersey, where he lived on the edge of poverty 
till 1892, and then died. 

Walt Whitman, we have seen, was born free. 
He lived a life of freedom. He saw that his 
countrymen possessed some of the elements of 
freedom, and he wished to set them wholly free. 
He addressed them as a prophet, that is, as one 
who speaks for another. He examined himself as 






1 



WALT WHITMAN 243 



the son of humanity, and disclosed the record of 
his observations. As a result the people said that 
he was possessed of a devil, that he was insane ; 
and when Emerson hailed the " Leaves of Grass " 
in the words, " I give you joy of your free and 
brave thought. I have great joy in it. I wish to 
see my benefactor " — the " Boston Post " could 
only account for the commendation of such a 
"prurient and polluted work," on the ground 
that Emerson also was suffering from temporary 
insanity, and was impure-minded as well. " Woe 
and shame," this newspaper cried, " for the land 
of liberty, if its literature's stream is to flow from 
the filthy fountain of licentious corruption. No 
merits can atone for the exulting audacity of the 
obscenity which marks a large portion of the 
volume ; its vaunted manliness is the deification 
of self and defiance of the Deity ; its liberty is 
the wildest license ; its love the essence of the 
lowest lust." It cannot be alleged that this was 
a mere hasty utterance, for it was written in 
1860, five years after the book appeared. 

Another Boston newspaper writer was less 
temperate; he thought the title of the book 
ridiculous, and the work itself a heterogeneous 
mass of bombast, egotism, vulgarity, and nonsense. 
As if this were not enough, he continued : " The 



244 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

beastliness of the author is set forth in his own 
description of himself, and we can conceive no 
better reward than the lash for such a violation ; 
the book should find no place where humanity 
urges any claim to self-respect, and the author 
should be kicked from all decent society as below 
the level of the brute ; there is neither wit nor 
method in his disjointed babbling, and it seems 
to us he must be some escaped lunatic raving in 
pitiable delirium.' , This was printed within the 
year of the publication of the " Leaves of Grass." 

The vilification of Whitman was not confined 
to any one locality, but was general throughout 
the United States. In Cincinnati, a writer for 
the " Commercial " assumed that his readers were 
ignorant of the achievements of Whitman, which 
was probably not an unjustifiable assumption, 
although the book had appeared five years pre- 
viously. He then proceeds to enlighten them by 
declaring that the author was " a person of coarse 
nature, blurting out impertinence under a full 
assurance of originality." 

In New York the appearance of the book was 
greeted with a general horror, which was well 
expressed in the " Criterion : " " Thus, then, we 
leave this gathering of muck to the laws, which 
certainly, if they fulfil their intent, must have 



WALT WHITMAN 245 

power to suppress such obscenity. In our allu- 
sions to this book we have found it impossible to 
convey any, even the most faint, idea of its style 
and contents, and of our disgust and detestation 
of them. The records of crime show that many 
monsters have gone on with impunity, because 
the exposure of their vileness was attended with 
too great delicacy. " The exposure of crime in the 
United States to-day is not handicapped by any 
such disability. 

By the year 1857, "Leaves of Grass" had 
grown to a volume of 384 pages, containing 
thirty-two poems, and was published in New 
York. The third issue was in 1860, by Thayer 
and Eldredge, of Boston, a handsome volume, in 
which were included one hundred and fifty-four 
poems. It might be thought that after five years 
of deliberation, and with so large a mass of mate- 
rial, the writers for the best magazines in the 
country should not have gone so far astray. 

In 1876 a magazine in New York, bearing a 
great name, went into the matter very fully, and 
declared its settled belief that Whitman was " a 
mere trickster." After falsifying all the history 
of his life, and assigning to his most ordinary 
actions the motives of a charlatan, that magazine 
set down as its deliberate conclusion that " Leaves 



246 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

of Grass " was " a performance of unparalleled 
audacity, an outrage upon decency, and not fit to 
be seen in any respectable house. Impudent and 
ridiculous as the book was, it would not have 
been easy to get it before the public, but accident 
and the author's cunning favoured him." 

The late Bayard Taylor, writing editorially in 
the " Tribune," repeated the same conclusions, 
and in 1881 that journal returned to the charge, 
classing the " dilettante indelicacies of Mallock 
and Oscar Wilde with the slop-bucket of Walt 
Whitman. The verses have been printed irreg- 
ularly, and read behind the door. Some have 
valued them for their barbaric yawp, some for 
their nastiness and animal insensibility to shame ; 
it is the author's mission to proclaim that garbage 
is as good as nectar, if you are only lusty enough 
to think so ; neither anatomy, sentiment, nor 
susceptibility to physical beauty has anything to 
do with it — it is entirely bestial, and the gross 
materialism of the verses represents art in its 
last degradation." 

This was about the time of the appearance of 
the fourth edition of " Leaves of Grass," by James 
K. Osgood and Company, and, as a result of the 
outcry, the district attorney served a notice upon 
the publishers that unless the issue were stopped, 



WALT WHITMAN 247 

the firm would be prosecuted in pursuance of the 
public statutes respecting obscene literature. This 
happened only twenty years ago. 

As late as 1882 the leading magazine in the 
United States, in its review of literature, could 
spare only three lines to say of the final edition 
of " Leaves of Grass " as we have it to-day : " It 
is a congeries of bizarre rhapsodies, that are 
neither sane verse nor intelligible prose.' ' The 
same magazine, ten years later, a date which many 
now living can remember, declined to publish an 
original poem by Whitman, on the ground that 
it was a mere improvisation. During the year just 
ended a writer in an important American review 
blamed Whitman, because " by his peculiarities 
he had blinded men's eyes to the real masters of 
American verse." 

In certain quarters in England which were 
dominated by the same ideas of morality, it was 
no better. The " Critic," then, as now, an arbiter 
of public taste, declared that Whitman was a 
poet " whose indecencies stink in the nostrils," 
that he was " as unacquainted with art as a hog 
with mathematics. His poems," that authority 
protested, " are innocent of rhyme, and resemble 
nothing so much as the war-cry of the Red In- 
dians ; this Walt Whitman reminds us of Cali- 



248 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

ban flinging down his logs and setting himself to 
write a poem ; the man who wrote page 79 of the 
4 Leaves of Grass ' deserves nothing so richly as 
the public executioner's whip; we call it the 
expression of a beast." 

In one small circle in England, however, Whit- 
man won instant recognition, and he was admitted 
into that brotherhood which had for its motive 
truth, sincerity, and earnestness, which appealed 
to things themselves to find out if that, was true 
which was being continually repeated about them. 
Rossetti, indeed, published selections from Whit- 
man's poetry, and lent to it the sanction of his 
name and pledged the reputation of his friends. 

It may be urged now that these expressions did 
not represent the sentiments of the people at 
large. We must not assume that everything which 
is printed in a newspaper is necessarily false. 
Besides, we have other evidence. Official notice 
was taken of Whitman's conduct. In 1865 he was 
employed as a clerk in the Department of the 
Interior, under the Secretary, James Harlan, and 
was dismissed from his post. The reason put 
forward for his dismissal by Secretary Harlan 
was that he had ten years before written a book 
which was full of indecent passages, and that the 
author was a very bad man and a free-lover. This 



WALT WHITMAN 249 

action of the Secretary for the Department of the 
Interior met with general approbation, as may be 
gathered from the newspaper comment upon it at 
the time. Though James Harlan was Secretary 
of the Interior, and had been a Methodist clergy- 
man and president of a small college, he was not 
a great man. A great man, a poet, who lived in 
Cambridge, was visited by a stranger, who was 
on his way to visit Whitman also ; but his host 
turned him aside, affirming that the author of the 
" Leaves of Grass " was no fit company for so 
distinguished a personage, that he was " a com- 
mon street blackguard, and nothing but a low 
New York rowdy." 

The defamers of Whitman were not all found 
in newspaper offices. Even Emerson appears to 
have repented of his first generous outburst. He 
had intended sending a copy of the book to Car- 
lyle, and described it as a nondescript monster, 
which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength ; 
but hesitated, as "it wanted good morals so 
much.'' However, he thought better of it and 
sent it to Carlyle, with this intimation, " After 
looking into it, if you think, as you may, that it 
is only an auctioneer's inventory of a warehouse, 
you can light your pipe with it." Emerson had 
a curious faculty for taking on the colour of his 



250 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

environment, and for assuming the tone of the 
persons to whom he wrote. 

There is a vice of praising as well as a vice 
of detracting, and Whitman suffered from both. 
His friends, though few, were not silent. Indeed, 
they were scarcely more temperate in speech 
than his traducers. One of his chief advocates, 
a warm-hearted, hot-blooded Irishman, described 
an opponent of Whitman as a lewd fellow and a 
dirty dog; another opponent, he asserted, had 
a narrow mind and a rotten heart ; and the pub- 
lishers were peddlers. This writer next turned 
upon the critics, and called them poetasters, 
plagiarists, hypocrites, prudes, eunuchs, fops, 
poisoners, blackguards, snakes, hogs, gnats, 
midges, vermin, monkeys, a paltry and venomous 
swarm condensed into a demon in the garb of an 
inquisitor, and by many other ingenious terms, 
which he claimed were descriptive. 

Intemperateness of speech is yet the character- 
istic of American literature. This wildness of 
statement, this unqualified praise and undiscrim- 
inating blame, this defiance of standards, are 
best observed in that form of art which is known 
as magazine writing. In a number of the " Cen- 
tury," so late as November, 1904, judgement is 
passed upon Gilbert Stuart's portraits of men, 



WALT WHITMAN 251 

and the picture of Judge Stephen Jones is de- 
scribed as a " living portrait, which for brilliant 
colouring, bold handling, firm modelling, natural 
pose, and strong individuality, must for ever stand 
unsurpassed ; " and the dictum of " Jouett, the 
Kentucky painter," is quoted : " Upon the whole, 
the most remarkable face and painting that I 
have ever seen." It may be so, but the evidence 
is not sufficient to convince those whose taste in 
portraiture is influenced by other standards than 
those which prevail in Kentucky, or even in the 
United States as a whole. The feeling yet re- 
mains that such admirable painters as Velasquez, 
and Rembrandt, and Raeburn are entitled to 
some consideration. Similarly, the conviction 
persists that neither the friends nor the enemies 
of Whitman spoke the truth. 

Indeed, Walt Whitman's reputation was not 
much better served by his friends than by his 
enemies. We have already seen that they were 
intemperate in their speech, cursing where cursing 
was unnecessary. They were also injudicious in 
their praise and were continually putting foolish 
notions into the poet's head. This was during the 
twenty years of his illness, and few reputations 
can stand up against twenty years of invalidism. 
In the end his friends gathered together and 



252 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

published a most foolish book, which contained all 
that had ever been said for or against the poet, 
and all that any one could remember of the most 
unimportant details of his daily life. Even the 
chart of a travelling phrenologist, whatever kind 
of quack that may be, was pressed into service by 
the poet's friends, to prove that he was not devoid 
of admirable qualities. 

Whilst Whitman had a vigorous life, we are 
glad to hear of his noble physique, his cleanly and 
comfortable, if unconventional dress, his daily 
ablutions, the sweetness of his breath, the splen- 
did flow and colour of beard and hair, and the 
tint of his bodily integument. But we could well 
spare the records of his long illness, of the med- 
icines which he took, and the pharmacological 
effects of his potions. The personal matters of 
an old man are rarely lovely ; the chamber life 
of an invalid is of interest only to a hospital 
nurse when she converses with a house surgeon. 
This spirit of curiosity did not cease to exist 
even when Whitman was dead, and we are fur- 
nished with the loathsome particulars of the 
autopsy. Even to professed pathologists, it can 
be of no interest to read that the dead poet's 
sigmoid flexure was unusually long, or that the 
pericardial sac contained an abnormally small 



WALT WHITMAN 253 

amount of fluid. Greatness was never claimed 
for Whitman on the ground of the condition of 
his entrails. As a matter of fact, the cause of 
death was tuberculosis, but the autopsy does not 
appear to have disclosed the nature of the lesion 
which caused paralysis in a man of fifty-three. 

There are many persons still living who knew 
Whitman well, and it would be easy to fill a vol- 
ume with their reminiscences of the poet, but it 
would be a dull book. Those with whom I have 
spoken testify with one voice to his candour, sim- 
plicity, and winsomeness, and refer to a quality 
which they call magnetic. They do not know what 
magnetic means, nor we either, save that it has 
nothing to do with magnetism. At any rate, he 
had an attractiveness, which made even the most 
casual acquaintance love him. 

No task to which a critic can set his hand is so 
difficult as the right appreciation of a book in 
which he thinks that he discerns qualities of nega- 
tive moral value. The people, high and low, offi- 
cial and plain, missed the mark in their aim at 
the morality of Whitman. They were insensible 
also to the poetical value of his work. The book 
of poetry and the book of nature lay open before 
them, and yet their eyes were blind to the lyric 
beauty of " Leaves of Grass." The temper of the 



254 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

time will explain the opposition to Whitman's 
doctrines ; it does not fully elucidate this strange 
phenomenon of literary blindness. A new moral- 
ity combined with a new poetry was too much. 

Poetry is a strange, elusive thing, made up of 
great thoughts, fitly, and, therefore, beautifully 
spoken, with rhythm, cadence, and sometimes 
rhyme. To be easily recognized it must have 
form, and to the casual reader form is the great- 
est of these qualities, greatest because most useful. 
It is by its form they recognize the thing. We 
are, therefore, compelled to examine the form of 
Whitman's poetry; and we shall find that its 
peculiarity, not to say its defect, of form, was 
another cause which prevented its acceptance. 

The makers of English poetry have only a few 
established forms into which their verse can be 
forced ; and verse which cannot be so fitted must 
go with such form as they choose to provide. 
French poets, on the other hand, have a form for 
everything ; or rather, they have no verse which 
will not fit the mould. It is as easy to write 
French verse in general as it is to write an Eng- 
lish sonnet ; it is as easy to recognize a French 
poet as an English sonnetteer. When we consider 
form in English poetry, the sonnet naturally 
arises before the mind, because its rules are the 



WALT WHITMAN 255 

most firmly established. In modern literature the 
sonnet is a poetical arrangement of fourteen 
rhymed verses set in a prescribed order, but there 
is to this day no agreement as to what that pre- 
scription shall be. The practice of Petrarch was 
to arrange the verses in an octave of two rhymes, 
and a sextet of two or three rhymes. Pierre delle 
Vigne arranged his verses in two quatrains and 
two tercets, the alternate lines of the quatrain 
rhyming ; and of the tercets, the first and fourth, 
the second and fifth, the third and sixth must 
rhyme. To mention one form more, for the sake 
of completing the illustration, though there are 
many others, Shakespeare set his verses in three 
quatrains of alternate rhymes, and finished with 
a couplet, though he made one sonnet entirely 
of couplets — and only six of them ; he put fifteen 
lines into one of the compositions and left yet 
another with a broken verse. 

To illustrate the confusion of mind that exists 
upon the subject of form in English versification, 
it may be recalled that there was a time when 
many persons contended that Shakespeare did not 
write sonnets at all, but only continuous poems 
of fourteen lines each. If we enquire of the poets 
what a sonnet is, they will tell us that they do not 
know and do not care. They write the thing in 



256 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

their own way. If we enquire of the wise men, 
they will reply that it is a deep-brained thing. 
They will compare it to the rise and fall of a 
wave, to a sky-rocket, to the apocalyptic beast 
with a sting in its tail. Wordsworth, who knew 
something of the sonnet, tried his hand at defini- 
tion, and the best he could do was to describe it 
as a convent cell, a garden plot, a key, a lute, a 
pipe, a gay myrtle leaf, a glow-worm lamp, a trum- 
pet, and, finally, in despair, as a Thing. 

The sonnet is the most firmly established form 
in English poetical composition ; and yet no one 
can tell what it really is, nor say which of its many 
forms is the best. How, then, shall we decide in 
what form poetry at large shall be written, and 
by what law shall we cast aside Whitman's pieces, 
upon discovery that they do not reveal a Miltonic 
observance of the usual practice of composition ? 

Now that we are so far entangled in this matter 
of literary form, it is as easy to go forward as to 
go back. Whitman, in a like case, freed himself 
at one stroke, by declaring that there was no such 
thing as style. He advised a person to write down 
the thing which he had in his mind, in the most 
suitable words which he could find, and if he found 
fitting words, and the thing were worth finding 
words for, then he would be writing in good style. 



WALT WHITMAN 257 

Similarly, he would advise a painter, who had a 
great conception, to select suitable pigments and 
lay them on in the proper way. A great artist 
who has a thing to say can say it with the end of 
a burnt stick. That was Whitman's method. 

To say that Whitman's writings are not like 
other poetical productions is to affirm that a fish 
is not like a dog. Both are excellent creatures in 
their own way. No one now finds fault with Mil- 
ton because he failed to apprehend the humor- 
ousness of early Japanese civilization, or of life 
in the King's navy. That was left for Mr. W. S. 
Gilbert, and he in turn lacks something of the 
sobriety of the great Puritan poet; but we must 
not find fault with him for that. 

When Whitman said there was no such thing 
as style, he meant that all things are not to be 
said in the same way. There are different species 
of compositions, as there are different media in 
which an artist may work, though some may suit 
his temperament better than others. Matthew 
Arnold knew something about literary composi- 
tion, and yet he once said to Mr. Russell : " People 
think I can teach them a style ! Have something 
to say, and say it as clearly as you can, that is the 
only secret of style." 

Whitman's friends took his saying literally; 



258 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

and all writing which had a semblance of style 
they declared to be false. Macaulay was their pet 
aversion. They said that he had the one way of 
saying everything, whether it was a description 
of the battle of Marathon or the pelting of a 
parliamentary candidate. One partisan was so 
extreme as to characterize that great writer as 
a brilliant, thimble-rigging, Scotch scoundrel. 
Strange to say, that is the error into which Whit- 
man has fallen. He evolved from himself a form 
which was capable of expressing adequately the 
supreme beauty of poetry. He misused it sorely 
by putting it to purposes for which it was never 
intended. He employed it on common occasions, 
and it served badly. Prose would have answered 
equally well for the most of his doctrine. 

Yet there is something in the human mind 
which revolts against the bizarre and grotesque, 
only because it is unfamiliar, like Japanese draw- 
ings, with their strange perspective, or even im- 
pressionist pictures, with their masses of form 
and colour. We cannot help it. There are some 
who bewail in secret their incapacity to compre- 
hend the poetry of Browning, and they are con- 
sumed with envy of those who have the hardihood, 
as they think, to pretend that they understand it. 
An eminent critic has acknowledged the shame 



WALT WHITMAN 259 

he felt, because Whitman's poetry offended his 
sense of form, and so provoked him to anger. It 
was only when he read the poetry in the French 
translation that he was able to enter into the 
heart of it ; because what was uncouth in English 
seemed probably enough to be an established 
form in the French, and so did not offend. 

A great poet sees the whole of life intimately 
and records his observations in a beautiful way. 
Life to him is so important and beautiful that he 
has no inclination to dwell upon any particular 
aspect of it. He has no doctrine to teach, no 
dogma to enforce. Poetry is not the best medium 
for propagandism. Other and greater poets than 
Whitman have set their hands to the task of 
enforcing political doctrine. Heine set out gayly 
as a soldier in the Liberation War of Humanity, 
and ended up in his " mattress-grave." Goethe 
was more modest in his ambition, and aimed only 
to be the liberator of Germany. "He became 
eighty years old in doing it," and humanity and 
Germany remained pretty much as they were. 
Byron in our own country shattered himself 
against forces which he did not understand ; and 
Shelley beat himself to death in his divine rage. 
Reform does not come in that way. 

Whitman, also, was more concerned with his 



260 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

doctrines than with his poetry ; and poetry is a 
jealous muse. She will turn aside unless followed 
wholly for herself. She is a kittle creature and 
will balk or go lame, if compelled to drag any- 
thing so heavy as politics or philosophy. Much 
of Whitman's writing is not poetry at all. Indeed, 
Whitman knew that as well as we do, and said so 
openly. For a similar reason some persons say 
that they find Browning's poetry unsatisfactory. 
Indeed, Carlyle advised him in the strongest 
terms to abandon the practice entirely and con- 
fine himself to prose. That great writer also was 
so absorbed in the deep things which he had in 
his mind, that, occasionally, it seemed to him 
quite unnecessary to find better rhymes than 
" well swear " and " elsewhere ; " " monster " and 
" at once stir ; " " is he " and " busy ; " kk lion " 
and " eye on ; " " tail up " and " scale up." 

But Whitman's fatal defect was that he did 
not see clearly. His vision was blurred. He had 
intuitions which he failed to resolve into adequate 
words. Only at times did his vision pierce the 
clouds, and extend to height and serenity, as in 
"Memories of Lincoln," with its splendid lyric, 
" Come, lovely and soothing death," and its noble 
apostrophe : " O Captain ! my Captain ! Our 
fearful task is done ; " which passes the measure 



WALT WHITMAN 261 

of words into " Tears ; Tears ; Tears." There is 
a common belief that it is only Browning and 
Wordsworth who wrote a great deal of bad 
poetry. That is a delusion. There are passages 
and pages in all poetry, with the single exception 
of Spenser's, which can only be matched by those 
gems of thought which find an adequate setting 
in the corner of a country newspaper. Most 
of Burns's poetry is bad; much of Browning's 
is merely grotesque ; and some of Tennyson's is 
silly. Wordsworth was not clearly revealed to 
the world until Matthew Arnold had stripped 
from his work what was merely a laborious 
writing of tracts. If the same good office were 
performed for Whitman, only a small pamphlet 
would remain; but surely men are intelligent 
enough by this time to perform that humble 
editorial office for themselves. 

Whitman had the poet's faculty for bringing 
out the occult meaning of words in phrases which 
have become part of the language. They are 
scattered profusely in his writings, and appeal 
instantly by their wonderful clearness and per- 
fection: "the shuddering organ;" "with floods 
of the yellow gold of the gorgeous sinking sun ; " 
" the coming eve delicious ; " " the welcome night 
and the stars ; " " the large imperial waves; " " the 



262 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

huge and thoughtful night; " " the white arms out 
in the breakers tirelessly tossing ; " " whom fate 
can never surprise nor death dismay." To pass 
from such phrases, taken at random, noble in con- 
ception and felicitous in expression, as they are, it 
would be easy to mention whole compositions of 
sustained beauty and splendour : " When lilacs last 
in the door-yard bloomed ; " " Out of the cradle, 
endlessly rocking ;" "At the last tenderly;" 
" Vigil strange, I kept on the field one night." 

These things could not be so adequately said 
in any other way, and no one but Whitman could 
express them in that manner. That is the test of 
style. When our first parents were engaged in 
their great work of classification, it is claimed by 
a high authority that a dispute arose over the 
nomenclature of a genus which was typical of 
the Rhinocerotidae : " Why do you call it a rhi- 
noceros ? " " Well, what else could you call it ? " 
was the sensible retort. So it was with Whitman. 
How else could these pieces have been written ? 
The sense and the sound are as inseparable as 
the music and emotion of the Mcintosh's lament 
when heard in a Highland glen. 

When Whitman's poetry first appeared, it 
was as full of poetical quality as it is now ; yet 
the people who read it were so dominated by the 



WALT WHITMAN 263 

spirit of their time, and so confused by the 
strangeness of its form that they could see in 
it nothing save his unconventional speech, his 
ungrammatical construction, his self-complacency, 
his misplaced Spanish and French words and 
phrases, and the turgid nonsense in much of his 
serious poetry. 

Apart from these spontaneous outbursts, Whit- 
man strove to do with deliberation what great 
poets have done unwittingly. His ambition was 
to give an expression of the Cosmos, which he 
understood to be the United States of America ; 
and he spent most of his time in telling how he 
was going to set about it. He was to do it by 
a series of glittering images, and he does produce 
the impression which he sought upon a reader 
who will give himself unreservedly into his hands, 
a willing victim to the poet's will. Wordsworth 
produced the same effect in four lines, and he did 
it quite incidentally, concerned as he was only 
about the death of a child : 

No motion has she now, no force ; 

She neither hears nor sees ; 
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, 

With rocks, and stones, and trees. 

The bent of Whitman's mind, also, was in 
reality toward the Infinite ; or rather he perceived 



264 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

no severance of mind from matter, of the finite 
from the infinite. That was a characteristic of 
the best New England philosophy. Emerson had 
it in perfection, and he was continually being 
derided for his "pantheistic prattling." Whit- 
man took the thing for granted. The specula- 
tions of Spinoza were beneath him — that the 
attributes of mind alone ; of Strauss — that the 
attributes of matter alone ; of Hegel — that 
the attributes of both together — are embodied 
in the Universal Being. To Whitman as to all 
the poets, 

God dwells within, and moves the world and moulds, 
Himself and Nature in one form enfolds, 
Thus all that lives in Him, and breathes, and is, 
Shall ne'er His power nor His spirit miss. 

Whitman spoke for that large class which can- 
not speak for itself, and, indeed, is not conscious 
that it has anything to say. Mr. Kipling spoke for 
the same class, but he did it with so much literary 
skill that they did not recognize his voice for their 
own. The mass of humanity does not express 
itself in words. The firemen who live a life of 
heroism amidst the disasters of a city ; the farmers 
who spend their years in patient toil ; the open- 
throated, hairy-breasted pioneers, cattle-breeders, 
miners and frontiersmen, who have pushed their 



WALT WHITMAN 265 

way against barbarity and desolation — these 
have quite other voices. 

Whitman also spoke for the openly vicious, 
and said to them, " Go and sin no more." To him 
there was nothing common or unclean. Nothing 
was outside of his sympathy. He sat at meat 
with publicans and sinners, with female "peri- 
patetics," who are technically called walkers-of 
the-street. He indulged in a way of life which is 
friendly to the knowledge of human nature and 
good feelings. He said to his companions : " Not 
till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you." 

There is the gospel of hope. He went about 
with the people amongst the soldiery in camp 
and hospital, amongst the negroes of the planta- 
tions, and the wandering journalists of great 
cities. He perceived that out of one blood are all 
men made, that toil and suffering is their portion, 
and he proclaimed in strong, sinewy sentences 
that the remedy for the evils which he witnessed 
was Love — the same which Jesus proclaimed in 
Nazareth. He strove to ameliorate the labours 
of men by the Institution of the dear love of com- 
rades : 

By the love of comrades, 

With the life-long love of comrades, 

By the manly love of comrades. 



266 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

Upon the earlier occasion when the doctrine of 
love was being preached, only a few of the Phari- 
sees of Judaea were filthy-minded enough to sup- 
pose that anything else was meant. 

Whitman's outlook was so wide that he in- 
cluded even the animals within his view. He 
established the brotherhood between mankind 
and the rest of the animal creation, though he did 
not push it quite to a relationship with marine 
engines and tramp steamships. Animals as well 
as men pleased him. They brought him tokens of 
himself : 

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, 
They do not make one sick discussing their duty to God. 

There is a common expression, " to stand on 
one's manhood," which has now become the cant 
of thieves. It is the habitual phrase in a news- 
paper called the " Star of Hope," which, some may 
not know, is an organ of opinion written entirely 
by convicts in the prisons of the State of New 
York. To Whitman the thing had a meaning. 
Because a living creature was a human being, and 
yet alive, however degraded or prostituted, in 
virtue of his humanity he might yet stand up and 
face the world. More than that, he proclaimed 
the awful fellowship which we all hold with 
" felons, with convicts in prison cells, with sen- 



WALT WHITMAN 267 

tenced assassins, chained and handcuffed with 
iron," because evil is also in us. 

Those who have had the patience to inform 
themselves of the views upon human life which 
prevailed during the time of Jonathan Edwards, 
will observe that Whitman looked upon the mat- 
ter in a different light. To those fathers in New 
England, humanity was a poor thing, a vile worm, 
loathsome, deformed, altogether filthy, and re- 
served only for burning. Whitman looked on the 
thing as it is, " not through the eyes of the dead, 
not as a spectre in books." He went to the bank 
by the wood. He looked at humanity undisguised 
and naked. " Clear and sweet was its soul : clear 
and sweet in all that is not its soul." To this poet 
it was yet the evening of the sixth day, when God 
surveyed everything which he had made, and 
behold it was very good. The Puritan theologians 
saw only that the wickedness of man was great 
in the earth, that every imagination of the 
thoughts in his heart was evil continually ; and 
whatever may have been the sentiments of the 
Creator toward His own handiwork, certainly it 
repented them that man had been made on the 
earth, and it grieved them to the heart. 

To Whitman's eyes, everything was beautiful, 
in the full light of the sun, which was ugly and 



268 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

distorted in the fearful gloom which brooded over 
the world of the theologians. That gloom was yet 
heavy over New England when Walt "Whitman 
came, crying out that all things should stand forth 
in the light. 

Fifty years have passed away since this loud 
voice disturbed the New England calm. In this 
half century there has been time for the people at 
large, friends and foes, to return to their senses, 
and apply a sane judgement to those two extreme 
views. In so far as Whitman dealt with the domi- 
nant passion of humanity, he was in the right. 
But it is a ground of offence which can never be 
removed, that he attempted to drag into litera- 
ture those secret functions of the human body, 
which, necessary as they are for carrying out its 
purpose, are not fit subject for mention outside 
of a laboratory, a hospital, or a sick-room. There 
are subjects which a professor of physiology may 
handle freely in his class-room. The consensus 
of mankind is that he shall not mention them in 
a mixed company which is not assembled for that 
specific purpose. It is conceivable that such a 
professor might consider it to be his duty to 
utilize every occasion for propagating knowledge; 
but such conduct would surely lay him open to 
misconstruction. He might be animated by the 



WALT WHITMAN 269 

loftiest of motives, yet this conduct would render 
him liable to be classed with insane persons and 
beasts, who habitually conduct themselves in a 
shameless way in public places. At least their 
conduct seems shameless to us. 

We admit to the uttermost that there is nothing 
obscene in nature, save the single exception of 
obscene persons. We also admit that there is 
such a thing as good taste. Every community 
and every age has its own notions as to what sub- 
jects are fit for mention, and what for reticence. 
In England there is a tacit agreement that the 
Pulex irritans shall not be referred to in polite 
society; the Pediculus, in all its varieties, is 
a proper subject for discussion. In the United 
States a contrary custom prevails. Half a cen- 
tury ago, in New England, it was not considered 
proper for women to regale each other, even in 
private, with an account of the pathology of the 
various organs of the body, as discovered by their 
most recent medical adviser; and there remain 
to this day some persons who consider such con- 
versation to be essentially obscene. 

Whitman's friends protest that there are not 
more than eighty lines in all his writings which 
can be challenged on this ground of offence, and 
they enumerate far more in the Hebrew scriptures 



270 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

and other writings of undoubted moral value. A 
great deal can be said in eighty lines, and we may 
admit at once that the conversation between two 
patriarchs in Lower Asia might be offensive to 
a person of very moderate susceptibilities. Old 
persons and primitive people are habitually free 
in their speech. But it is the universal opinion 
that there are matters which are not fit subject 
for poetry, or even for discussion between decent 
and civilized men. The enquiries of children 
are sometimes embarrassing to perfectly sensible 
people; but if a child gloried in such public 
exhibitions, we should say he was branded with 
the mark of the beast. 

In the " Song of Myself," and in much else- 
where, Whitman has committed this offence, and 
we cannot acquit him even on the grounds of 
naivete. An anatomical catalogue, even when 
enlivened by occasional reference to the physio- 
logical functions for which the various organs are 
designed, is without essential beauty. No amount 
of genius can clothe it with the grace of poetry. 
No excess of " naturalness " can justify a writer 
in holding up such things to public view. The 
attempt to do so will always end in failure, for 
people will turn away their eyes. The thing is 
an offence to the human mind, and has been an 



WALT WHITMAN 271 

offence ever since humanity differentiated itself 
from the rest of the animal creation. Therefore, 
we can understand why Whitman's generation 
turned its eyes away from the spectacle of human- 
ity which he held up, even if it missed thereby 
much that was valuable and beautiful. We, with 
our wider experience and more distant point of 
view, have learned to neglect the objects which 
should offend, and happily do offend us. For us 
remains the beauty alone. 

Nor can we consider it a ground of praise that 
Whitman devised a new form of expression, un- 
less we are convinced that the forms established 
by long usage were worn out. There have been 
great poets, who have gone deep and far, perhaps 
as deep and far as Whitman went, and yet gave 
no signs of being hedged about. Whitman knew 
little about established forms of expression in art, 
and cared nothing. But he knew and cared for 
the things out of which art is created. More than 
any other, he fulfilled the saying of Hazlitt that 
poetry is the stuff out of which the life of the 
people is made. 

He had a perception and knowledge of the 
beauty of the human form and of the meaning 
and beauty of every created thing. The leaf of 
grass was as wonderful as the stars ; the tree-toad 



272 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

was a master work of the highest, and the run- 
ning blackberry would adorn the fabric of the 
heavens ; the hinge of the hand put to scorn all 
other machinery, and the cow in the pasture sur- 
passed any statue. 

All interest in Whitman's vagaries of speech 
and conduct and doctrine, and in the conditions 
against which he was in revolt, has passed away, 
save for the interest which we all feel in the 
phenomena of literature. As this interest disap- 
pears, we behold the just measure of his poetical 
genius, and assent to the truth contained in those 
lines which appeared at the time of his death, in 
an English periodical, where Americans do not 
look for such things. They are remarkably just 

— though they do not at all indicate a sense of 
his philosophic importance, or of the gift which he 
conferred upon his fellow men of this latter day 

— namely, in opening our eyes to the beauty and 
dignity of human beings and human things, and 
breaking down one, at least, of the false conven- 
tions of Puritanism ; somewhat as Wordsworth 
opened the eyes of the generations which came 
after him to the beauty and grace of inanimate 
objects ; as Burns revealed the poetry of lowly 
life ; as Rousseau " introduced something green 
into literature.'* 



WALT WHITMAN 273 

" The good gray poet," gone ! Brave, hopeful Walt ! 

He might not be a singer without fault. 

And his large, rough-hewn rhythm did not chime 

With dulcent daintiness of time and rhyme. 

He was no neater than wild Nature's wild, 

More metrical than sea winds. Culture's child, 

Lapped in luxurious laws of line and lilt, 

Shrank from him shuddering, who was roughly built, 

As cyclopean temples. Yet there rang 

True music through his rhapsodies, as he sang 

Of brotherhood, and freedom, love, and hope, 

With strong, wide sympathy which dared to cope 

With all life's phases, and call nought unclean. 

Whilst hearts are generous, and whilst woods are green, 

He shall find hearers, who, in a slack time 

Of puny bards and pessimistic rhyme, 

Dared to bid men adventure and rejoice. 

His " yawp barbaric " was a human voice ; 

The singer was a man. America 

Is poorer by a stalwart soul to-day, 

And may feel pride that she hath given birth 

To this stout laureate of old Mother Earth. 



JOHN WESLEY 



JOHN WESLEY 

A British subject from an outland region of the 
Empire, who had suffered in heart, person, and 
estate through the turmoil in South Africa, went 
to London in search of restoration and comfort. 
He found neither the one nor the other. It was 
during the events preceding the Coronation, and 
he lay in his lodgings too weak to resist the 
temptation of reading the morning papers, and 
yet, unfortunately, with strength sufficient to 
perform that labour. From them he gained the 
impression that the great things which had been 
done were effected by men who arranged the 
routes of processions, who gathered on the Dover 
pier to welcome important personages, who turned 
neat diplomatic phrases, and skilfully resisted 
the importunities of claimants for places in the 
Abbey, or other social distinctions. To test the 
correctness of such an impression, this bewildered 
subject left his bed and began a tour through 
the Fen country, following in the steps of a man 
who in his own way had performed great deeds 
from Saint Ives to Ely and back to Sidney 



278 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

Sussex College, to Edgehill, Marston Moor, and 
Dunbar. The impression proved to be wrong; 
he learned that the great deeds have always been 
wrought by men who did not take much thought 
about the appearance of things ; that history is 
not made by actors ; that it is made by people 
who are fulfilling their life functions, with a fine 
unconcern as to the impression which they are 
creating. 

We can never get beyond the merest guess as 
to why any given series of events occurs. We do 
not even know how it is that we digest our food, 
and how its elements are transformed into force. 
We can mark certain stages separated from one 
another by a mystery of change ; we observe the 
results which are pleasurable or painful, or, as we 
call them, good or bad. The first business of an 
historian is to ascertain about any given period 
whether the main drift was in the direction of 
good or evil ; and events are only to be inter- 
preted in their relation to this main current. One 
portion of the people will do evil continually; 
another portion will do evil for a while ; but all 
the people will not do evil together for any great 
length of time. It is not the nature of the human 
mind to do only evil continually ; and this view 
is put forward with confidence, in spite of some 



JOHN WESLEY 279 

considerable authority to the contrary. The move- 
ment of the race is away from the beast. It will 
probably excite the laughter of fools to hear once 
more that the only greatness is that which assists 
in this movement. All other excursions after 
greatness end in blind alleys. Napoleon, for 
example, who, above all men, desired to attain 
to greatness, got himself into a pretty bad hole 
by following his own estimate of things. " When 
a king is said to be a good man," he declared, 
" his reign is unsuccessful ; " and again, " A prince 
who passes for good in the first year of his reign 
is a prince who will be ridiculed in his second." 
If Napoleon is now a subject of ridicule, it is 
certainly not due to any excess of goodness on 
his part. 

Our impressions of a period are based upon the 
characterization of persons whose conduct lends 
itself readily to literary treatment; and if it is 
amenable to the dramatic form we fall into the 
error of believing that they had all to do with 
the shaping of events. The eighteenth century is 
fixed in our minds as a period of frank brutality, 
because Johnson was brutally frank; of ill- 
natured jesting, because Pope was an ill-natured 
jester ; of intricacy and finesse, because Horace 
Walpole was a shrewish tale-bearer, and Selwyn 



980 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

a snickering gossip : as an age of rhetoric, because 
Burke persuaded himself that what he was saying 
was true, and, in some degree, still imposes his 
belief upon us. 

As we get further away from the eighteenth 
century, we shall see that it was one of those 
periods in which the human race had reached one 
of its low levels of degradation. We shall also 
see that the portion of the race which occupied 
the British Islands began an upward movement 
toward better things. It is one of the fascina- 
tions of history to note the predominance of good 
or evil in any given epoch, and to follow the 
course by which those conditions came to prevail. 
We cannot trace all the steps of the gradual 
descent by which the English people arrived in 
the slough of the early part of the eighteenth 
century ; nor can we follow the upward movement 
by which they emerged into the light toward the 
close of that period, any more than we can follow 
the slow upheaval of a continent, by which por- 
tions here and there lift up their heads. But we 
can note the points at which this movement in 
either direction is most perceptible. 

This downward career began at the Restoration 
of Charles, and it is the fashion to explain the 
evils which followed that event by the formula : 



reaction against Puritanism. The truth is that 
-word in its Land under 
tion, and all but perished by the 
sword. H rid was to have ha 

own way for a space. The spirit which animated the 
Puritans had forsake .red for 

cantem: .? a hundred 

years, till th vlism ca. rth. 

Puritanism was not a r. 

I the bat r v >r the satis- 

I a high A view and 

a wide outk ,se who take refuge 

in Puritanism a^ e ribb'd, cabined, and con- 

fined/' Rather, it in to them a ** convent's narrow 
room, a pen prison to which 

they doom themselves is in truth no prison to 
them. There are qualities which find their best 
development where there is not too much liberty. 
It is given unto nations as unto individuals 
"to walk in the woods." There is a refuge from 
sorrow in the spirit as well as in the senses. It 
has been on: of the spirit that all die 

prophets have called men, when they perceived 
that their misery was sore upon them ; and in that 
lies the secret of the attraction of Puritanism. It 
was unto tins spirit that Jeremiah appealed, when 
he declared that no nation can be righteous when 



282 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

the life of the individual is impure ; Isaiah, that 
national power lies alone in righteousness ; Micah, 
that there is a God of the poor and an avenger 
of them ; the prophets of the Restoration, that re- 
ligion with form or without form may be equally 
acceptable ; and the great Unknown Prophet, that 
unrighteousness is only to be overcome by suffer- 
ing. But the finest type of Puritanism is Saint 
Francis, who attained to such a mastery over the 
things of the world that he was enabled to cry, 
" Praised be my Lord for our sister, the death of 
the body." 

This upward movement toward righteousness 
is usually slow and imperceptible. At times it is 
accelerated, and the upheaval is accompanied by 
much dislocation and many faults. The latter half 
of the eighteenth century witnessed such a violent 
disturbance, and it is associated with the name 
of John Wesley. It was he who drew the spark ; 
therefore he is the great figure of the eighteenth 
century, as Cromwell is the great figure of the 
seventeenth, Calvin and Luther of the sixteenth, 
Savonarola of the fifteenth, Jesus of Nazareth and 
Saul of Tarsus of the first. 

Of all these great men, John Wesley — his 
names were John Benjamin — is the best known 
to us. We know him through contemporary writ- 



JOHN WESLEY 283 

ers : at least we know what they said that they 
thought of him ; we have full and elaborate ac- 
counts at the hands of his enemies ; and above all, 
we have his own journals in twenty-six volumes 
of manuscript, copious extracts from which have 
been published. But these extracts have not been 
made public with entire frankness. They are 
meant to show every side of Wesley save that 
which interests us most. They are profitable for 
instruction unto godliness; they are hortative 
and mandatory to Methodists ; but to the reader 
at large these excerpts afford little information 
of the wealth of human material in the manuscript 
volumes. 

If there be any persons in these days who en- 
gage in the laborious occupation of keeping a jour- 
nal, it is certain that a hundred years hence they 
will be derided for neglecting to record events 
which will then appear to have been of real im- 
portance. Wesley's life covered practically the 
whole of the eighteenth century ; he lived in the 
midst of affairs which we are accustomed to look 
upon as the subject-matter of history, and he had 
a knowledge of men whose names are associated 
inseparably in our minds with that period. Yet 
in his journal we find no mention of, or only 
the scantiest references to, the two desperate 



284 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

attempts of the Pretender to regain the throne, to 
the events by which India and Canada were won, 
and the American Colonies lost to England. The 
truth is, the people were not profoundly interested 
in those operations, any more than the readers of 
the newspapers the other day were permanently 
interested in the eruption from a mountain which 
destroyed the lives of fifty thousand persons. 
Wesley was close to the heart of England, while 
Walpole and his associates stood entirely aloof 
from its passion and enthusiasm. They believed 
in the efficacy of a lie ; and persons like Wesley, 
who believed in the truth, were looked upon as 
merely eccentric or ignorant or ill-bred, and in 
any event not worthy of consideration. 

The character of the literature which that age 
produced would alone reveal the stagnation out 
of which it arose ; Johnson's ponderous diction- 
aries, the raillery of Swift, the distillation of 
Pope's ill nature, the indolence of Thomson, the 
servile dedications and the tedious vulgarity of 
the novelists, and the outpourings of the doctrin- 
aires. Literature had become entirely dissociated 
from morality as well as from life. Gray was 
writing elegies in churchyards. Wesley took his 
stand upon his father's tomb in Epworth and 
preached : " The Kingdom of Heaven is not meat 



JOHN WESLEY 285 

and drink, but righteousness, and peace, and 

joy-" 

It would at first sight appear superfluous to add 
anything to what has been said upon the subject 
of Wesley, this century past, in the numerous 
lives of him which have been written, more par- 
ticularly during the recent celebration of the 
bi-centenary of his birth, from 89,087 pulpits, by 
48,344 ministers, and 104,786 local preachers, to 
nearly twenty-five million adherents. Yet in the 
feeble hope that this cloud of witnesses may have 
left something unrevealed, and in a well-grounded 
belief that outside these twenty-five millions of 
sealed ones there are some who have an interest 
in serious things, it is worth taking the event as 
a pretext for making one or two observations, 
which, if they have no new bearing upon Wesley, 
may have something to do with the spirit of the 
time in which he lived, and with the people who 
are called by his name. 

To one who has tasted and found the richness 
of Calvinism, it is no use appealing with the doc- 
trine of Wesley. He was merely an Arminian, 
and any Calvinist knows what that means. He 
believed that men could be led, and that they 
could not be driven ; that the God of Calvin was 
" a tyrant and executioner ;" that the decrees of 



286 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

God were conditional upon human action ; that 
the sovereignty of God is compatible with the 
freedom of man ; that man is free and able to will 
and perform the right ; that every believer may 
be assured of his salvation ; and very much other 
blasphemy besides. The fact is, Wesley was no 
theologian. He was not qualified by nature for 
that high office ; he " never had a quarter of an 
hour's lowness of spirit since he was born." 

It was Wesley's capacity for seeing the correct 
proportion of things which prevented him from 
becoming a mere theologian. With his strong 
common sense, he perceived that there are "many 
truths it is not worth while to know, curious 
trifles upon which it is unpardonable to spend our 
small pittance of life." He had a great heart, if 
not a mind of the proper texture for theological 
invention. The fact which was of supreme import- 
ance in his eyes was that the individual should 
have a correct attitude of mind toward the things 
which are right, and toward the things which are 
wrong, and the attainment of this correct attitude 
he signified by the term Conversion. But there 
was something more. He was not satisfied with 
a mere intellectual assent, a passive toleration of 
goodness and a theoretical dissent from evil ; he 
demanded that the intellectual process should be 



JOHN WESLEY 287 

quickened by emotion into an intense conviction 
of the heinousness of sin, accompanied by an 
ardent desire to turn away from it with hatred 
and horror. 

But theologians who place this doctrine of con- 
version in the forefront of their argument are 
prone to the discouraging inference that sinners 
alone can attain to any great degree of saint- 
liness. To Wesley, therefore, is attributed all 
manner of evil. He is spoken of by his friends as 
a profligate, who entered school as a saint and left 
it a sinner. The period during which this degra- 
dation occurred was that between his twelfth and 
sixteenth year. As he went immediately to Christ 
Church as a scholar, his transgressions could not 
have been very revolting. Wesley himself rather 
lends colour to the belief in his sinfulness by his 
desperate confession that he was wont to console 
himself with the delusion that he was not so bad 
as other people, that he had merely a kindliness 
for religion, and read his Bible and prayers in a 
perfunctory way. Even to-day, in Oxford, such 
a state of mind would not be accepted as proof of 
any great debauchery. 

The only specific crime that can be laid to 
Wesley's charge was his going in debt, and that, 
according to Benjamin Franklin, is the first of all 



288 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

vices, lying being the second. But the sin is less 
heinous when committed by a man with fifty 
pounds a year, than it is when his income 
amounts to fifty thousand pounds. He did borrow 
money, and his mother once wrote to him express- 
ing the great concern which she felt for the man 
who had lent him ten pounds. The Wesley fam- 
ily always lived on the edge of poverty, which is 
a much worse situation than penury, and there 
is something heroic in the struggle of the father 
against the pressure of limited means. In his 
early days he had been imprisoned for debt, and 
all his life it was a struggle with the grim spectre. 
There is nothing more tragic in life than an 
honest man in the toils of pecuniary necessity. 
To his son he writes : " I will assist you in the 
charge for ordination, though I am myself just 
now struggling for life ; the last ten pounds 
pinched me hard, and I am forced to beg time of 

to pay him the ten pounds you say he 

lent you. What will be my fate God only knows, 
yet my Jack is fellow of Lincoln." There is the 
heroism of a noble father. 

It may be said at once that Wesley's youthful 
career was beyond reproach, that all the domestic 
relations within his father's family were entirely 
admirable and marked by the strongest common 






JOHN WESLEY 289 

sense, if we omit the unfortunate affair of his 
sister Hetty, of which Mr. Quiller-Couch has re- 
cently informed us so fully. The father was cap- 
able of the highest sacrifice, the mother appears 
to us as a woman of soundest judgement ; and 
we need not make too much of the complaint in 
a letter to her son : " It is an unhappiness almost 
peculiar to our family that your father and I sel- 
dom think alike." Even his sister Emilia revealed 
the family trait of good sense in a manner that 
was marvellous in one so young, when she wrote 
to her brother: "Never engage your affections 
before your worldly affairs are in such a posture 
that you can marry." If all young persons were 
but to apprehend the soundness of that advice, 
they would save themselves and others from much 
misery. 

Sanity of conduct and reasonableness of be- 
haviour are the great characteristics of Wesley's 
career; that is to say, his actions were always 
those of a gentleman; and those who are now 
called by his name will probably take an undue 
interest in the fact that he was a gentleman in 
other senses as well. His family was bound up 
with the De Wellesleys, and they had a seat at 
Welsme in Somerset from time immemorial, cer- 
tainly since the time of Athelstan, and that is 



290 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

long enough. This quality of urbanity comes out 
in every page of his journal, giving offence or 
disrespect to none, and insisting upon the respect 
that was due to himself. 

Wesley illustrates this quality well in his 
famous interview with Beau Nash. The position 
accorded to that notorious man reveals to us the 
qualities which were considered admirable in 
those days. This son of a glass-maker, as poor in 
means as in birth, by sheer effrontery raised him- 
self to the eminence of a king. To-day he would 
not be tolerated in London by the police, and even 
in New York he would figure, in the daily press for 
one week, in the district magistrate's court for 
one day, and thereafter would be heard of no more 
for at least five years, unless his sentence were 
reduced by conduct which is officially called good. 

Wesley was entreated not to preach in the pre- 
sence of that ruffian, " because no one knew what 
might happen." However, he did preach, and 
pretty plainly too. He told his hearers, M they 
were all under sin, high and low, rich and poor, 
and many seemed to be a little surprised. ,, Beau 
Nash, however, overcame his surprise at this in- 
civility, and coming close to the preacher, en- 
quired by what authority he said those things. 

" By the authority of Jesus Christ, conveyed to 



JOHN WESLEY 291 

me by the now Archbishop of Canterbury, when 
he laid hands upon ine and said: 'Take thou 
authority to preach the gospel.' " 

" This is contrary to Act of Parliament ; this 
is a conventicle." 

" Sir, the conventicles mentioned in that Act 
are seditious meetings, but this is not such ; here 
is no shadow of sedition." 

" I say it is, and besides, your preaching 
frightens people out of their wits." 

" Sir, did you ever hear me preach ? " 

"No." 

" How, then, can you judge of what you never 
heard?" 

" Sir, by common report." 

" Common report is not enough. Give me 
leave, sir, to ask, is not your name Nash ? " 

" My name is Nash." 

" Sir, I dare not judge you by common report." 

" I desire to know what this people comes here 
for?" 

"You, Mr. Nash, take care of your body; we 
take care of our souls, and for the good of our 
souls we come here," a listener broke in ; where- 
upon Mr. Nash replied not a word, and walked 
away. 

Some Methodists may also be interested to 



292 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

know that the founder of their church always en- 
joyed a certain social distinction. He was enter- 
tained by admirals ; his portrait was painted by 
Reynolds and Romney ; toward the end of his 
life he had more invitations to preach in churches 
than he could accept ; he became " an honourable 
man, and scarce any but Antinomians durst 
open their mouths " against him. Of eighty let- 
ters written by him in one year, nearly half are 
addressed to titled ladies ; which shows that titled 
ladies in those days were pretty much the same 
as they are now. 

It would be long to trace all the influences that 
made for Wesley's opportunity, influences affect- 
ing himself and the community at large. The 
world is never left without witnesses to the truth, 
though their voice may be small and its crying 
only in the wilderness. The voice of Bunyan was 
unheeded for a generation, and two small books 
lay unnoticed till suddenly their spirit blazed up 
in Wesley's time. These were the " Serious Call," 
and "Christian Perfection." In them Law pro- 
claimed the necessity for a change of nature, self- 
denial, and a life of devotion for all who would 
serve God truly. This spirit was working quietly 
in Oxford even in the time of Samuel Johnson, 
who freely acknowledged its influence upon him- 



JOHN WESLEY 293 

self, though it must be confessed that the out- 
ward manifestations in his case were not great. 

William Law, the author of these books, having 
declined to take the oath prescribed at the acces- 
sion of George the First, lost his fellowship in 
Emmanuel College ; and he also left the Church 
to become tutor to Edward Gibbon, the father of 
the historian ; but he had created an atmosphere 
congenial to the serious men who came after him. 

The movement was the exact counterpart of 
that which took place in Oxford a hundred years 
later. There was the same tendency to asceticism, 
to a patristic interpretation of the Scripture, and 
a slavish following of the rubric. Those who were 
under its influence fasted and prayed; they 
strove against fanciful sins and practised self- 
denial for the sake of practising it. The Tracta- 
rian manifestation, as in the case of Methodism, 
was dominated by a single mind ; both began in 
a small way, and remained so whilst they were 
confined to their purely local environment. But 
to the more modern men religion always appeared 
as an aesthetic exercise ; to Wesley it was a power 
for the amendment of the individual life, without 
which that life could not be amended. 

So long as Wesley remained in the Church, 
bound by her traditions and her rigid rubric, he 



294 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

was powerless to do very much ; but the Church 
saw to it that he did not remain there long. H Our 
minister," so runs one of the many communica- 
tions which he received, " having been informed 
you are beside yourself, does not care you should 
preach in any of his churches." 

When Wesley began his career at Oxford, he 
had no idea where it would end. He had been 
curate in his father's parish, and returning to his 
college, he joined with his brother and a few 
companions who were in the habit of partaking 
weekly of the communion — certainly not a re- 
markable manifestation of evangelicism. From 
this exercise they passed on to the study of the 
Greek Testament and to private devotion, and 
from that to the visitation of the poor, the sick, 
and prisoners. It is a curious commentary upon 
the times that such ordinary avocations should 
have excited any notice whatever. 

This little band had no cohesion ; they had no 
plan of campaign, and each individual was to 
proceed upon his own lines. The Wesleys alone 
arrived at a lasting distinction. Whitefield con- 
sumed his life in the fervour of popular preach- 
ing, voyaging here and there — to Georgia, to 
New England, to Scotland and Wales — raising 
a wave of emotion everywhere, but doing nothing 



JOHN WESLEY 295 

toward its advancement. Impulsive, but lacking 
logical skill and self-restraint; gifted with ora- 
torical power, dramatic force, and pathos, he was 
able to move the people, so that " the tears made 
white gutters down their black cheeks;" but 
Wesley was at hand to direct the forces which 
"Whitefield had evoked. John Clayton, another 
of the coterie, settled in Manchester and remained 
a Jacobite and high-churchman to the end of his 
days. Benjamin Ingham became an out-and-out 
dissenter, which Wesley never did. Gambold 
became a Moravian Bishop, and James Hervey 
was seized with the tenets of Calvinism. 

About this time, the rising conscience of the 
people took notice of the condition of those who 
were imprisoned for debt and bearing the penalty 
due to felons alone. It was proposed as a rem- 
edy to send them to the New World, where they 
might better their own condition and improve 
the country which they were made to adopt. The 
promoters laboured under the curious fallacy that 
intellectual belief has something to do with con- 
duct, and they had as an arriere pensee that the 
Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Cherokees, and 
the Creeks, who inhabited the borders of Georgia, 
might be improved by a commerce with those 
apostles from the English prisons. 



296 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

It would appear that Wesley himself had an 
exaggerated notion of the ripeness of the Indians 
for instruction on account of their freedom from 
preconceptions. He argued that they were fit to 
receive the gospel in its simplicity, because they 
were " as little children, humble, willing to learn, 
and eager to do the will of God." To him the 
Indian mind was virgin soil ; " they have no 
comments to construe away the text, no vain 
philosophy to corrupt it ; no luxurious, sensual, 
covetous, ambitious expounders, to soften its un- 
pleasing truths." But these erroneous views arose 
out of the sentimentality of the times. Coloniza- 
tion was looked upon as the sovereign remedy for 
disposing of the heathen at home, and for correct- 
ing the errors of the heathen in the places to which 
these missionaries were to be sent. It is difficult 
to see what good was to accrue to the savages, for 
they were commonly held to be already the pos- 
sessors of all manly qualities and all domestic 
virtues. 

It was in this frame of mind that Wesley went 
to Georgia, to convert the Indians, as if there 
were not work enough in his native land ; but it 
did not take any considerable enquiry to convince 
him that he " could not find or hear of any In- 
dians on the continent of America, who had the 



JOHN WESLEY 297 

least desire of being instructed." He at once 
consulted with his friends as to whether God did 
not call him back to England ; and upon the way- 
home he arrived at the valuable conclusion " that 
he who would convert others must first be con- 
verted himself." 

The immediate circumstances which led to 
Wesley's return from America are singular, when 
considered in relation with the after events of 
his life. His mission of course was bound to be 
a failure ; all missions are which are conducted in 
the spirit of a priest, and the spirit of Wesley 
was, as yet, as priestly as any which ever eman- 
ated from Oxford. The colony also was a fail- 
ure, as all bodily transportations always have 
been. Men do not change their natures by chang- 
ing their sky, and those who were fit for a prison 
in England were probably more competent still 
after their long comfortless journey across the 
sea. 

Wesley was in trouble from the beginning ; his 
spirit was intolerant, his parishioners were corrupt 
and headstrong, and before long the breach came. 
He thought he observed " something reprovable 
in the behaviour " of one Mrs. Williamson, and he 
told her so ; " whereupon she appeared extremely 
angry, and at the turn of the street through 



298 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

which they were walking home, went abruptly 
away." The young curate repelled her from the 
communion table, and the following morning her 
husband had him arrested for defamation, and 
claimed a thousand pounds damage. Wesley, 
like a true cleric, took his stand that the young 
woman had not some time the day before signi- 
fied her intention of communing ; and he weak- 
ened his position by quoting the authority given 
to all curates "to advertise any who had done 
wrong." He does not specify his objections in 
this particular case ; but we have the other side 
of the story at any rate, for on the next day Mrs. 
Williamson swore to and signed an affidavit that 
Mr. Wesley had many times proposed marriage to 
her, and that she had rejected his advances in 
favour of Mr. Williamson's. 

Another law-suit arose out of this, and certainly 
Wesley was reprimanded in the court for calling 
the lady's uncle a liar and a villain, although, 
according to all accounts, his statements were well 
within the truth. He was required to give bail 
to answer to the suits, and upon refusing he was 
put "on the limits." It was at this propitious 
moment that he consulted with his friends, in 
a purely impersonal way, " as to whether God did 
not call him to return to England." They agreed. 



JOHN WESLEY 299 

and Wesley himself " saw clearly the hour was 
come for leaving that place ; " so, bail or no bail, 
about eight o'clock at night he shook the dust 
of Georgia off his feet and disappeared along 
with three companions, whose identity does not 
interest us. 

Like many other levanters, they did not find 
the way an easy one. They were lost in the 
woods; they waded streams and struggled in 
swamps; they suffered from hunger and thirst, 
and the sharpness of the cold, lying abroad in 
the wet and frost ; yet they commended them- 
selves to God, and He renewed their strength. 
Finally they arrived in Charleston, and after 
"a thorough storm" and a "proper hurricane," 
followed by a " small fair wind," Wesley arrived 
safely in England once more. 

Shortly after his return to England, Wesley 
fell in with Peter Bohler on " a day much to be 
remembered." This evangelist from the Moravian 
Brethren afterwards became instrumental in his 
conversion. That is Wesley's own account, 
though other claimants arose, amongst them the 
friends of Jonathan Edwards, who held that 
the austere New England divine was responsible 
for the change. His journal contains an exact 
account of the event. " In the evening," it reads, 



300 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

" I went very unwillingly to a society in Alders- 
gate Street, where one was reading Luther's 
preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About 
a quarter before nine, while he was describing the 
change which God works in the heart through 
faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. 
I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for sal- 
vation ; and an assurance was given me that He 
had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved 
me from the law of sin and death." 

This was in 1738, and Wesley's work had 
begun. He further qualified himself by a pil- 
grimage and residence of three months in Ger- 
many amongst the Moravian Brethren, who had 
much in common with Methodism as we know it 
to-day. This sect still constitutes a society de- 
voted to good works within the German Protest- 
ant Church, and so far as one can judge, it is the 
possessor of a most Christian form of doctrine, 
as one would expect from the lineal descendants 
of John Huss. The body of doctrine which now 
bears the name of Wesley was in reality trans- 
ported from the Moravians, and a new force 
given to their tenets : that Scripture is the only 
rule of faith and practice : that human natur 
totally depraved ; that the law of God the Father 
is supreme; that the Godhead of Christ is 



JOHN WESLEY 301 

real as His humanity; that reconciliation and 
justification come through His sacrifice by the 
operation of the Holy Spirit. The insistence 
upon good works, the fellowship of believers with 
each other and in Christ, the belief in the second 
coming, and the resurrection of the dead unto 
life or unto condemnation, complete the identity 
of the two systems. 

Wesley was resolute not to go outside the 
Church. His aim was to found a society of seri- 
ous people within the Church, as an ecclesiola 
in ecclesia, after the Moravian pattern. As late 
as 1756 a conference was closed with a solemn 
declaration never to separate from the Church, 
and " all the brethren concurred therein." He was 
continually warning people against the " madness 
of leaving the Church." On one occasion he went 
so far as to threaten a society, that if they left 
the Church they would see his face no more. The 
question came up formally again at a conference 
in 1788, when Wesley was 85 years old, and the 
sum of the deliberation was, that in fifty years 
they had not varied from the Church in one arti- 
cle of doctrine or discipline. If the Church of 
England had enlarged itself to allow free play for 
this new spirit, it would be to-day, not the Church 
of England alone, but the church of all who 



302 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

dissent from the doctrine or practice of Rome. 
Wesley was a churchman to the last, and always 
adopted the churchman's view, as in his descrip- 
tion of the people of the Isle of Man, wherein he 
says : " A more loving, simple-hearted people than 
the Manxmen I never saw, and no wonder, for 
they have but six Papists and no Dissenters or 
Calvinists in the island." But he was driven out 
of the Church — at least out of the churches 
— he had loved so well, the Church his father and 
grandfather had served faithfully, as well as many 
other ancestors, during at least two centuries. 

Wesley did not take to field preaching as a 
matter of choice ; " he sympathized with the Devil 
in his dislike of it ; for he loved a commodious 
room, a soft cushion, and a handsome pulpit." 
To the end of his life it was a cross to him ; but 
he knew his commission and saw no other way of 
preaching the gospel to every creature. But as he 
had no intention of holding his peace, and as the 
churches were closed against him, he followed 
the sensible procedure, for a preacher, of going 
where the people were ready to be preached to, in 
the streets and fields. It was a hard matter, but it 
was not of his choosing. " I could scarce reconcile 
myself at first to this strange way of preaching 
in the fields, having been all my life so tenacious 



JOHN WESLEY 303 

of decency and order that I should have thought 
the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been 
done in a church." 

Three successive entries in the Journal read : 
" I preached at St. Lawrence in the morning, and 
afterwards at St. Katherine Cree's Church. I was 
enabled to speak strong words at both, and was, 
therefore, the less surprised at being informed 
I was not to preach any more in these churches." 
" I preached in the morning at St. Ann's Alders- 
gate, and in the afternoon at the Savoy Chapel : 
upon free salvation. I was quickly apprised that 
at St. Ann's likewise I am to preach no more." 
" I preached at St. John's Wapping, at three, and 
at St. Bennet's, Paul's Wharf, in the evening. 
At these churches likewise I am to preach no more." 

However, he came to it, and began near Bris- 
tol by expounding the Sermon on the Mount, 
which, he observes in his Journal, "was one 
pretty remarkable precedent for field preaching, 
though I suppose there were churches at that 
time also." The next day he " submitted to being 
more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the 
glad tidings of salvation to about three thousand 
people." The following Sunday, he preached to 
a thousand persons in Bristol at seven o'clock in 
the morning, afterwards to fifteen hundred on the 



304 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

top of Hannam Mount in Kingswood, and still 
again to five thousand in the afternoon. He went 
to Bath, and was not even " suffered to be in the 
meadow where he was before, though this occa- 
sioned the offer of a more convenient place, where 
he preached Christ to about a thousand souls." 
It was upon this occasion that Wesley had his 
famous interview with Beau Nash. 

The world was now his parish, and he com- 
menced a systematic ministration, preaching free 
salvation to the condemned felons in Newgate : to 
a society in Bear Yard, remission of sins : to a 
meeting in Aldersgate Street, the truth in love : 
and the efficacy of prayer in the city prison of 
Oxford. At Blackheath he preached to twelve 
thousand people, in Upper Moorflelds to seven 
thousand, and upon the same day to fifteen thou- 
sand more at Kennington Common. Next day he 
was off to Bristol, and " as I was riding to Rose 
Green," we read, "in a smooth, plain part of the 
road, my horse suddenly pitched upon his head 
and rolled over and over. I received no other 
hurt than a bruise on one side, which for the pre- 
sent I felt not, but preached without pain to six 
or seven thousand people, on that important di- 
rection : 4 Whether ye eat or drink, or whatsoever 
you do, do all to the glory of God.' ' 



JOHN WESLEY 305 

The bodily manifestations of mental disturb- 
ance, which appeared in the course of the preach- 
ing, have been a feature of all revivals in every 
country. Jonathan Edwards witnessed them in 
America ; the Disciples observed them in Judaea. 
The explanation of the phenomenon is as simple 
as the explanation of hysteria. The will, which 
ordinarily controls the body, becomes dominated 
by emotion, and the body is left to be swayed by 
the new force. Self-control, or control by the will, 
is an admirable thing, but it is not the greatest 
thing in the world. Evil emotions or good emo- 
tions may at times gain control of the body, and 
the idea has long ago been abandoned that it was 
an evil spirit that gained control of men's wills 
during revivals. If the body be deliberately 
handed over to the emotions, an abnormal situa- 
tion is created, and that is ever the danger in the 
surrender of the will. 

Wesley believed that Whitefield's objections to 
these manifestations " were chiefly grounded on 
gross misrepresentations of matter of fact," but 
presently he had occasion to inform himself ; " for 
no sooner had he begun to invite all sinners to 
believe in Christ than four persons sank down 
close to him, almost in the same moment ; one 
lay without sense or motion, a second trembled 



30G ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

exceedingly, the third had strong convulsions all 
over his body, but made no noise unless by groans, 
and the fourth, who was equally convulsed, called 
upon God with strong cries and tears." As his 
ministry progressed, these violent manifestations 
disappeared ; " none were now in trances, none 
cried out, none fell down or were convulsed ; only 
some trembled, a low murmur was heard, and 
many were refreshed with the abundance of 
peace." Wesley saw as clearly as we do that there 
were two dangers : to regard these things as if 
they were essential to the inward work ; and to 
condemn them altogether. 

About this time Wesley was in some trepidation 
because the powers of evil were so complacent, 
but very soon he was freed from any anxiety on 
that score. It was at Bristol that he had the 
first of his long, varied experience at the hands 
of the mob ; " all the street was filled with people, 
shouting, cursing and swearing, and ready to 
swallow the ground with fierceness and rage." 
Some of the ringleaders were arrested, but they 
began to excuse themselves before the mayor 
by laying charges against the preacher. The 
magistrate made the sensible answer: "What 
Mr. Wesley is, is nothing to you : I will beep 
the peace ; I will have no rioting in this city." In 



JOHN WESLEY 307 

the same place, a young man rushed into the 
meeting, " cursing and swearing vehemently ; " 
but before he left, " he was observed to have the 
Lord for his God." 

The Journal is full of the rough humour of 
a semi-civilized people. In London, the rabble 
drove an ox into the assemblage, which was listen- 
ing to a discourse upon doing justly, loving mercy, 
and walking humbly. At Pensford they had 
baited a bull with dogs, and by main strength 
partly dragged and partly thrust him against the 
table ; but Wesley was unmoved, and, as the Jour- 
nal says, " once or twice put aside his head with 
my hand, that the blood might not drop upon my 
clothes, intending to go on as soon as the hurry 
should be a little over." One of the converts 
" became exceedingly angry because those base 
people would fain have interrupted, but she was 
quickly rebuked by a stone which lit upon her 
forehead ; in that moment her anger was at an 
end and love only filled her heart." Wesley gives 
but an ill account of Newcastle. "I was sur- 
prised," he says ; " so much drunkenness, cursing 
and swearing, even from the mouths of little 
children, do I never remember to have heard 
before in so small a compass of time." 

The savagery to which Wesley was exposed 



308 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

is almost incredible. He was stoned ; he was seized 
by a press-gang ; he was caught by the hair and 
struck in the face; the buildings in which he 
preached were torn to pieces and set on fire. On 
one occasion he was attacked on a bridge, and it 
came into his mind, " if they throw me in the 
river, it will spoil the papers which are in my 
pocket ; " but he did not doubt that he could 
swim, as he had on a thin coat and a light pair 
of boots. No wonder he was brought to exclaim, 
" O, who will convert these English into honest 
heathens ! " 

This man now began to be talked about, and 
well he might, for he was turning the English 
world upside down. He was interesting hundreds 
of thousands of people in the serious matter of 
their own sinfulness, and, if he did not insist as 
strongly as he might upon the necessary punish- 
ment of it, he certainly made it very clear how 
they might amend their ways. 

Amongst the numerous crimes laid to Wesley's 
account was a conviction for selling gin ; that lie 
was receiving large remittances from Spain in 
order to make a party amongst the poor : that as 
soon as the Spaniards landed he would join with 
twenty thousand followers : and that he kept two 
kk Papist priests" in his house. One, who claimed 



JOHN WESLEY 309 

that he was an eye-witness, testified that Wesley 
had hanged himself, and that only the breaking of 
the rope prevented the fatal issue ; another, in con- 
versation with a Jesuit, asserted that Wesley was 
one of them ; upon which the Jesuit, with all the 
perspicacity of his race, uttered the devout wish : 
" I would to God he were." From one pulpit it 
was preached that John Wesley had been expelled 
from his college, and even the character of his 
mother was attacked ; the nastiest calumnies were 
uttered against those who attended the meetings 
by night ; but within a year, " one minister, who 
was very forward, grew thoughtful, and shortly 
afterwards went into his own necessary house, 
and there hanged himself." 

This mother of Wesley is the last person in the 
world, one would think, whose conduct was open 
to censure, judging from the manner in which she 
conducted herself toward her husband and her 
children. We are at no loss for exact informa- 
tion as to the conditions under which they were 
brought up, for she has set down at some length 
her method of procedure in educating her 
numerous family. She first lays down her prac- 
tice for their securing a regular course of sleeping, 
and when they were turned a year old, "they 
were taught to fear the Lord and to cry softly, by 



310 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

which they escaped the abundance of correction 
they might otherwise have had ; and that most 
odious noise, the crying of children, was rarely 
heard in the house. " At dinner they were suffered 
to eat, and drink small beer, as much as they 
would, but not to call for anything ; drinking or 
eating between meals was never allowed, nor was 
it suffered to go into the kitchen to ask for any- 
thing of the servants. After family prayers they 
had their supper. At seven the maid washed 
them, and beginning at the youngest she undressed 
them, and got all to bed by eight ; " there was no 
such thing allowed in the house as sitting by 
a child till it fell asleep." 

In order to form the minds of children, Mrs. 
Wesley writes in a general way, the first thing to 
be done is to conquer their will, and bring them 
to an obedient temper ; for the subjecting of the 
will is a thing that must be done at once, and 
the sooner the better ; for, by neglecting a timely 
correction, they will contract stubbornness and 
obstinacy, which is hardly ever after conquered. 
Whenever a child is corrected, we are assured, it 
must be conquered ; and when the will of a child 
is totally subdued, and it is brought to revere and 
stand in awe of its parents, then a great many 
childish follies may be passed by. Self-will, she 



JOHN WESLEY 311 

protests, is the root of all sin and misery; so, 
whoever cherishes this in children ensures their 
after-wretchedness. The children were quickly- 
made to understand that they might have nothing 
they cried for, and they were instructed to speak 
handsomely for what they wanted. So, we may 
well believe, " that taking God's name in vain, 
cursing and swearing, profaneness, rude, ill-bred 
names were never heard among them." 

Her way of teaching was this : One day she 
allowed to a child wherein to learn his letters ; 
then he began at the first chapter of Genesis, and 
was taught to spell the first verse ; then he read 
it over and over, till he took ten verses, which he 
quickly did. It is almost incredible, she says, 
what a child may be taught in a quarter of a 
year if he have good health. In addition to this 
general system, the mother had certain specific 
rules, which probably were carried out to the 
letter. " Whoever was charged with a fault of 
which they were guilty, if they would ingenu- 
ously confess it and promise to amend, should 
not be beaten ; " — this rule she was sure pre- 
vented a great deal of lying; — that no sinful 
action, as lying, pilfering, playing on the Lord's 
Day, or disobedience, should ever pass unpun- 
ished ; that no child should ever be chid or beat 



312 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

twice for the same fault ; that every single act of 
obedience should be always commended and fre- 
quently rewarded, according to the merits of the 
cause ; that the properties should be inviolably 
preserved, and none suffered to invade the pro- 
perty of another in the smallest matter ; that 
promises be strictly observed ; that no girl be 
taught to work till she can read very well. This 
is the very reason, she discovered, why so few 
women can read fit to be heard, and never to be 
well understood. 

Wesley himself had some very definite ideas 
upon the education of girls, and he was firmly of 
the opinion that if parents had the desire to send 
their daughters "headlong to hell," they could 
not do better 'than send them to a fashionable 
boarding-school. He had seen girls acquire 
pride, vanity, and affectation in these institutions 
of learning ; and others since his time have in ado 
the same observation. 

Wesley's own marriage was not a success, at 
least in so far as success in that relation is com- 
monly estimated. An emotional man is usually 
unhappy in his domestic life ; his wife always is. 
The popular evangelist had been in many perils 
from women, and his own ardent temperament 
was continually forcing him into needless dan- 



JOHN WESLEY 313 

gers. Love for the race is apt to condense into 
love for the individual, but it quickly vaporizes 
again. 

We have documentary evidence that he made 
proposals to Mrs. Williamson in Georgia, when 
she was Miss Hopkey ; at least that lady made 
affidavit that he had ; but he was a curate at the 
time, and his avowal must be interpreted in that 
light. This affair with Miss Hopkey was serious, 
and he was in such sore distress about it that he 
had recourse to the elders of the Moravian Church 
for advice. They exacted a pledge from him that 
he would abide by their decision, and when they 
decided against the union, he did so abide, con- 
soling himself with the text — " Son of man, be- 
hold I take from thee the desire of thine eyes." 
Yet, fifty years afterwards, when he recalled the 
experience, he confessed that he had been pierced 
through as with a sword. The thoughts of youth 
are long-lasting. 

The love affairs of Wesley, harmless and 
slight as they were, are as difficult to follow as 
the amours of Horace. He was plotted against 
and he was planned for. He had the usual affair 
with a sister of a college friend ; he carried on 
a long correspondence with a young widow, the 
niece of Lord Lansdowne; and with a singular 



314 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

catholicity of taste he had another series of let- 
ters running to her mother, under a fanciful 
name. But his most notorious entanglement was 
with Grace Murray, the widow of a sailor, who 
had sought relief from her bereavement in do- 
mestic service. Wesley appears to have behaved 
with great good nature, and complacently allowed 
her to transfer her affections to another quarter. 
Under the ministrations of yet another woman 
he came to have serious doubts upon the sound- 
ness of his views as set forth in his " Thoughts 
on Marriage." A conference of the brethren was 
ordered, and in a full and friendly debate they 
convinced him " that a believer might marry 
without suffering the loss of his soul. ,, The per- 
son who effected this change of mind was Mrs. 
Vazeille, " a woman of sorrowful spirit," and he 
married her after an acquaintance of fifteen days. 
If his marriage was a mistake, certainly he had 
had the benefit of advice from his friends ; his 
brother, when he heard of it, " groaned all day 
and could eat no pleasant food ; " another parti- 
san leaves it on record that " he felt as though 
he could have knocked the soul out of the 
woman ; " and Southey, who was a writer with 
a taste for classification, brackets Mrs. Wesley 
in a triad with the wives of Socrates and Job. 



JOHN WESLEY 315 

Yet Wesley did his duty by the lady, at least 
in the way of offering advice. On one occasion 
he wrote in a spirit of remonstrance : " Attempt 
no more to abridge me of my liberty. God has 
used many means to curb your stubborn will and 
break your temper. He has given you a sickly 
daughter. He has taken away one of your sons ; 
another has been a grievous cross, as the third 
probably will be ; he has suffered you to be 
defrauded of money, and has chastened you with 
strong pain. Are you more humble, more gentle, 
more placable than you were? I fear the re- 
verse." These are scarcely the words in which to 
inculcate the virtues of humility, gentleness, and 
placability upon a woman of high spirit. 

The unhappiness of the pair was a matter of 
public comment, and the solution arrived at by 
one pious follower was that his sufferings were 
the chastisements of a loving father ; hers, the 
immediate effects of an angry and bitter spirit. 
Wesley bore the chastisement with great resolu- 
tion, and wrote to his housekeeper, Mrs. Ryan, 
who was not exactly the most suitable confidante, 
as she had at least two husbands living, the 
plaintf ul words : " I cannot say, ' take thy plague 
away from me,' but only, ' let me be purified and 
not consumed.' " 



316 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

With perfect truth it may be affirmed that the 
great Evangelist bore the marks of his wife's 
violence upon his body ; yet he endured his trial 
with patience, and consoled himself by reverting 
to his original views upon marriage, and finding 
further evidence in the Scripture that a person in 
his situation should have remained single ; but he 
afterwards praised God for the slight mercy that 
he had been enabled to remain unmarried so long 
as he actually did. After twenty years of married 
life his wife left him, purposing " never to return ; 
for what cause I know not to this day." Her 
husband made an entry in his diary, employing 
the Latin tongue to give full force to his thought, 
" Non earn reliqui ; non dimisi ; non revocabo." 

Into the merits of the case it is unnecessary to 
enter further, but one cannot prevent the suspi- 
cion that Wesley's zeal in going to and fro in the 
Kingdom, from Aberdeen to Land's End, cross- 
ing and re-crossing the Irish Channel continually, 
may have arisen partly out of his domestic rela- 
tions. He recalls " an odd circumstance," which 
gives a deep insight into his mental make-up, and 
suggests a psychological reason for his marital 
unhappiness : " I never relish a tune at first hear- 
ing, not till I have almost learned to sing it : but 
as I learn it more perfectly, I gradually lose my 



JOHN WESLEY 317 

relish for it. It is the same in poetry, yea, in all 
the objects of imagination. I seldom relish verses 
at first hearing ; till I have heard them over and 
over they give me no pleasure, and then give me 
next to none when I have heard them a few 
times more, so as to be quite familiar. Just as a 
face or a picture, which does not strike me at first, 
becomes more pleasing as I grow more acquainted 
with it, but only to a certain point ; for when I 
am too much acquainted it is no longer pleasing." 
It is easy to appreciate the situation of a woman 
in the face of such a disposition as that. 

If Wesley failed to rule his domestic household 
well, it cannot be laid to his charge that he 
neglected the discipline of his ecclesiastical charge. 
He wrote to his preachers, lay and clerical, on all 
possible subjects ; he admonished, reproved, and 
remonstrated ; and when these gentle measures 
did not avail, he had free recourse to expulsion 
from the society. To Hugh Sanderson, one of 
his Irish preachers, he writes with great plain- 
ness: "Avoid all familiarity with women; you 
cannot be too wary in this respect ; use all dili- 
gence to be clean ; free yourself from lice, they 
are a proof of laziness ; do not cut off your hair, 
but clean it and keep it clean ; cure yourself and 
your family of the itch — a spoonful of brimstone 



318 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

will do it ; let not the North be any longer a pro- 
verb of reproach to all the nations." Wesley- 
went to the facts ; that was his motto as well as 
Voltaire's. 

He assembled his preachers together and gave 
them lessons in elocution. Success in public 
speaking, he told them, consists in nothing but " a 
natural, easy, and graceful variation of the voice, 
suitable to the nature and importance of the sen- 
timents we have to deliver ; and the first business 
of a speaker is to speak that he may be under- 
stood without babbling with his hands." He 
divided his disciples into classes, and read lectures 
to them from Pearson on the Creed, from Aid- 
rich's " Logic," and " Rules for Action and Utter- 
ance." 

But Wesley's activity was not wholly consumed 
in spiritual exercises : he assumed a large know- 
ledge of physical ailments ; and when a person 
has once got it into his head that he can cure all 
manner of bodily diseases by the simple device of 
the laying on of hands, or the scarcely more com- 
plicated procedure of prayer, he is apt to acquire 
a deep disdain for those who employ the slow and 
uncertain methods of medicine and the painful 
operation of the knife. It was so with "WosW. 
He practised medicine on his own account, and 



JOHN WESLEY 319 

was particularly impressed by the value of elec- 
tricity in the cure of various diseases ; indeed, he 
held what one might call an outdoor clinic every 
day, " wherein any that desired it might try the 
virtue of that surprising medicine ; " and he testi- 
fied that thousands had received unspeakable 
good. He looked upon electricity as a thousand 
medicines in one, and the most efficacious in 
nervous disorders which has ever been discovered. 
Many parts of the Journal read like an advertise- 
ment in the daily press ; for example : " After the 
sermon in Brechin, the Provost desired to see us, 
and said, 4 Sir, my son had epileptic fits from his 
infancy; Dr. Ogilvie prescribed for him many 
times, and at length told me he could do no more. 
I desired Mr. Blair last Monday to speak to you, 
and I gave him the drops you advised. He is now 
perfectly well and has not had one fit since.' " 

In " reflecting upon the case of the poor woman 
who had continually pain in her stomach," the 
great preacher could not but remark the "in- 
excusable negligence of physicians, who pre- 
scribed drug upon drug, without knowing a jot of 
the matter concerning the root of the disorder, 
and without knowing this they cannot cure, 
though they can murder the patient. Why, then, 
do not all physicians consider how far bodily 



320 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

disorders are cured or influenced by the mind ; 
and why are these cases outside of their sphere? 
Because they know not God." All this, too, 
sounds strangely familiar to our ears. 

He did not find the state of the profession any 
better in Ireland, and all his spare time was taken 
up with poor patients. " Blisters for anything or 
nothing were all the fashion during his previous 
visit to Ireland ; this time, the grand fashionable 
medicine for twenty diseases was mercury sub- 
limate. Why is it not a halter or a pistol ? They 
would cure a little more speedily." He was called 
to a house, " where a child was dying of the small- 
pox, and rescued her from death and the doctors, 
who were giving her saffron to drive out the 
disease." 

Nor had Wesley a very high opinion of the law. 
In the early part of his life he " first saw that 
foul monster, a Chancery Bill, a scroll of forty- 
two pages to tell a story which needed not to have 
taken up forty lines, stuffed with stupid, senseless, 
improbable lies, many of them quite foreign to the 
question." Twenty years later he saw "the fellow 
of it, which was called a Declaration," and he was 
led to enquire : " Why do lawyers lie for lying's 
sake, unless it be to keep their hand in." 

The Journal touches life at every point : music, 



JOHN WESLEY 321 

painting, travel by land and by sea, books and 
decoration, farriery and farming, food and drink, 
besides the deeper matters of Calvinism and Anti- 
nomian pietism. After listening to the oratorio 
"Judith," he records with some vehemence : 
" There are two things in all modern music which 
I can never reconcile to common sense — one is 
singing the same words ten times over, the other 
is singing different words by different persons at 
one and the same time." He was particularly 
struck by a picture of Rubens ; yet could not see 
" either the decency or sense of painting the fig- 
ure stark naked ; he thought it shockingly absurd, 
and that nothing could defend or excuse the 
practice, even if an Indian were to be the judge. " 
From his experience of sea travel he formulated 
the very sensible rules : Never pay till you set 
sail ; go not on board till the captain goes, and 
send not your luggage on board till you go your- 
self. He passed judgement upon the " high enco- 
miums which have been for many years bestowed on 
a country life," in the words, " there is not a less 
happy body of men in all England than the farm- 
ers ; in general their life is supremely dull and 
usually unhappy too." He conducted many experi- 
ments in dietetics upon his own person, in the 
way of abstention from meat and alcohol, and for 



322 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

a year would drink nothing but water — a form 
of self-denial which was apparently less common 
then than now. 

Wesley was a man of education, that is to say, 
he had a familiarity with all the writings then 
extant. The names of Shakespeare, Homer, Vir- 
gil, Pascal, Luther, Dryden, are scattered every- 
where in his Journal, and he has recorded very 
pertinent observations upon their works. The 
writings of Rousseau, and of his " brother infidel 
Voltaire," he knew very well ; Swedenborg he 
thought an entertaining madman ; the " Senti- 
mental Journal Through France and Italy," he 
thought should read " Continental, as sentimental 
is not English ; " but he fully approved of John- 
son's " Tour," and thought the " observations very 
judicious." 

We are continually struck by evidence of his 
sound sense, which, as has already been remarked, 
was a leading family trait. Once in seven years 
he burnt all his sermons, thinking it a shame that 
he could not write better ones then than seven 
years ago. After reading a book to prove that 
the moon was not inhabited, he made the sensible 
observation : " I know that the earth is ; of the 
rest I know nothing." A reformed pirate once 
attempted to wean him away from the habit of 



JOHN WESLEY 323 

writing books, on the ground that men ought to 
read no book but the Bible. But the wise evan- 
gelist showed his good judgement by declining 
" to enter into a dispute upon religion with a sea 
captain seventy-five years old." At Edinburgh 
four children were brought for baptism, and as the 
visitor had previously seen the minister perform 
the ceremony, he was at no loss how to proceed ; 
in other places he followed the practice of im- 
mersion. 

It must be confessed, on the other side, that 
Wesley wrote two letters to the newspapers, and 
after being desired for nearly forty years to pub- 
lish a magazine, he yielded at length, and began 
to collect materials for it. Amongst the temporal 
business he had to settle in his eighty-fourth year 
was the dismissal of his editor for " causes that 
were insufferable." He had borne with him for 
twelve years, and finally, when he had inserted 
in the magazine " several pieces of verse," with- 
out the proprietor's knowledge, that gentle pub- 
lisher could endure it no longer, so he made 
an effort to amend the editorial management 
"for the short residue of his life." Looking 
at the " Arminian," which was the name of the 
magazine, one is inclined to adopt Wesley's view 
of the case, and applaud his radical measure. 



324 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

Wesley had a pretty gift for description. The 
town of Clonmel he described as " the pleasantest 
beyond all comparison, which I have found in 
Ireland. It has four broad, straight streets of red 
brick houses which cross each other in the centre 
of the town. Close to the walls on the south side 
runs a broad, clear river. Beyond this rises a 
green and fruitful mountain, which hangs over 
the town. The vale runs many miles east and 
west and is well cultivated." The observations 
which he made upon the state of Ireland are 
remarkably just, unless the Irish have been sadly 
belied. " There is no country on earth where it 
is so necessary to be steadily serious," he writes, 
"for you are generally encompassed with those 
who, with a little encouragement, would laugh 
and trifle from morning to night." At Birr he 
was preaching in the street to " a rude, senseless 
multitude," when a Carmelite friar cried out, 
"You lie." "Knock the friar down," the audi- 
ence shouted ; " and it was no sooner said than 
done." 

Edinburgh he thought the dirtiest city he had 
ever seen, "not excepting Colen in Germany. 
The situation of the city on a hill shelving down 
on both sides, with the stately castle upon a 
craggy rock, is inexpressibly fine. The main 



JOHN WESLEY 325 

street, so broad and finely paved, is far beyond 
any in Great Britain ; but how can it be suffered 
that all manner of filth should be thrown into it 
continually ? Where is the magistracy, the gentry, 
and the nobility of the land, that they allow the 
capital city of Scotland, yea, and the chief street 
in it, to stink worse than a common sewer? I 
spoke to them as plain as ever I did in my life, 
but I never knew any in Scotland offended at 
plain speaking." Dumfries he found to be a 
clean, well-built town, having two elegant churches, 
the mountains high but extremely pleasant. 

The itinerant evangelist was greatly surprised 
at the entertainment which he received in Scot- 
land. The food proved to be good, cheap, in great 
abundance, clean as any one could desire, and well 
dressed. Above all, he was amazed that " not any 
person did move any dispute of any kind, nor ask 
him any questions concerning his opinions, so that 
the prejudice which the Devil had been several 
years planting was torn up by the roots in one 
hour." Every Scotchman knows where that pre- 
judice comes from, but it is not often that an 
Englishman makes so clear an avowal. 

The Scotch character was ever a source of won- 
der to Wesley, as to many a foreigner before and 
since. Upon one occasion he spent some hours in 



326 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

the General Assembly, and was surprised to find 
that any one was admitted, even lads twelve or 
fourteen years old ; that the chief speakers were 
lawyers ; that a single question took up the whole 
time, " which, when I went away, seemed to be as 
far removed from a conclusion as ever, namely, 
' Shall Mr. Lindsay be removed to Kilmarnock 
Parish or not ? ' Indeed," he observed, " there is 
seldom fear of wanting a congregation in Scot- 
land ; but the misfortune is they know everything, 
so they learn nothing. Every one here loves at 
least to hear the word of God. Certain this is 
a nation swift to hear and slow to speak, though 
not slow to wrath." The implication is very 
subtle, that in the Scotch mind the whole duty 
of man ends with the hearing of the Word. He 
went to church in Aberdeen, and though he lis- 
tened with all his attention he only understood 
two words, " Balak " in the first lesson, and " be- 
gat " in the second. 

In Edinburgh he went so far as to sing a 
Scotch psalm, "and fifteen or twenty people 
came within hearing, but with great circumspec- 
tion, keeping at their distance as though they 
knew not what might follow." At Inverness he 
was struck by the remarkable seriousness of the 
people — an observation that has been made by 



JOHN WESLEY 327 

less acute persons — though he thought this less 
surprising, when he considered that at least for a 
hundred years they had had a succession of pious 
ministers. Finally he adds : " Amongst all the 
sins they have imported from England, the Scots 
have not yet learned to scoff at sacred things." 
It has always been a fixed belief in Scotland that 
any evil which manifested itself north of the 
Tweed was received from some extraneous source 
— from England, or France, or from the Devil. 

Wesley witnessed the celebration of the com- 
munion in the West Kirk, Edinburgh, and from 
his description it would appear to this day that 
the Church of Scotland is faithful to its tradi- 
tions. " After the usual morning service the min- 
ister enumerated several sorts of sinners, whom 
he forbade to approach to the table, and I was 
informed that the communion usually lasted till 
five in the evening." Wesley should be the last 
person to complain of the length of a service, for 
he habitually preached for three hours at a time, 
and sometimes far into the night. However, after 
visiting Scotland with a fair degree of regularity 
up to his seventy-seventh year, he made the hu- 
miliating discovery, " that he was not a preacher 
for the people of Edinburgh." Upon this last 
visit he writes : " I did not shun to declare the 



328 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

whole counsel of God, and yet the people hear and 
hear, and are just what they were before." 

Wesley had the same peculiar genius as George 
Borrow for chance encounter with rare characters, 
and as that genius is usually associated with the 
literary gift, it is hard to know just how much 
reliance is to be placed upon the accounts of what 
is alleged to have taken place. Certainly the 
accounts as we have them are amusing. In Bris- 
tol he lit upon a " poor, pretty, fluttering thing, 
lately come from Ireland, and going to be a singer 
in a playhouse. She went in the evening to the 
chapel, and thence to watch-night, and was almost 
persuaded to be a Christian." 

At Hull the coach in which he was crowded was 
attacked by a mob, who threw in at the windows 
whatever came next to hand ; but a large gentle- 
woman who sat in his lap screened him so that 
nothing came near him. Going up a steep narrow 
passage from the sea, he encountered a man at 
the top, and looking him in the face said : " I wish 
you a good-night." The man " spoke not, nor 
moved hand or foot," but replied to the civil 
salutation, "I wish you was in hell." 

Upon a certain visit to London he was " nobly 
attended : " behind him on the coach were ten 
convicted felons, loudly blaspheming and rattling 



JOHN WESLEY 329 

their chains. By his side sat a man with a loaded 
blunderbuss, and another upon the box. 

At Newark one big man, " exceeding drunk, was 
very noisy and turbulent till his wife seized him 
by the collar, gave him two or three hearty boxes 
on the ear, and dragged him away like a calf." 

At Tullamore he met a man who had been under 
water full twenty minutes, " which made him more 
serious for two or three months." In the midst of 
a sermon, the preacher saw a large cat leap down 
upon a woman's head, and run over the heads and 
shoulders of many more, " but none of them cried 
out any more than if it had been a butterfly." At 
Eotherham, an ass walked gravely in at the gate, 
came up to the door of the house, and stood stock 
still in a posture of deep attention. " It is well," 
Wesley adds, "only serious persons were present." 
Near Bradford, " the beasts of the people lifted 
up their voice, especially one called a gentleman, 
who had filled his pockets with rotten eggs ; but 
a young man coming unawares clapped his hand 
on each side and mashed them all at once, and he 
was perfume all over." At Brough in Westmore- 
land, he preached " at a farmer's house under some 
shady trees, when a little bird perched on a branch 
and sang without intermission, from the beginning 
of the service to the end." 



330 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

The following bit of narrative is inimitable 
even by the author of " Lavengro : " A poor man, 
special drunk, came marching down the street 
with a club in one hand and a large cleaver in the 
other, grievously cursing and blaspheming, and 
swearing he would cut the preacher's head off. 
When he came nearer, the Mayor stepped out of 
the congregation, and strove by good words to 
make him quiet, but could not prevail ; on which 
he went into his house and returned with his 
white wand. At the same time he sent for the con- 
stables, who presently came with their staves. He 
charged them not to strike the man unless he 
struck first ; but this he did, as soon as they came 
within reach, and wounded one of them in the 
wrist. On this the other knocked him down, which 
he did three times before he would submit. The 
Mayor then walked before the constables on 
either hand, and so conducted the man to gaol. 

Wesley toiled at his desk as well as upon the 
road. He wrote books, dedicating to them the 
hours from five in the morning till eight at night, 
which was M all the time he could spare." He 
would write a sermon or a tract as he sat upon a 
stone waiting for a ferryman, and if they were as 
hard to write as they are to read it was a marvel- 
lous feat of endurance. The bulk of printed 



JOHN WESLEY 331 

material which, he left behind him is incredible, 
and the task of mastering it can only be likened 
to reading the contents of a theological library or 
a Methodist "book concern" — concern is the 
proper term to employ. His writings are not 
books, they are in reality concerns. Even during 
the period of his courtship — a short period it is 
true — whilst he was confined to the house with 
a sprained sinew, he employed his time in writing 
a Hebrew Grammar and lessons for children ; he 
had previously constructed a grammar of the 
Greek and French languages. 

"Make poetry your diversion, not your busi- 
ness," was the advice given to Wesley by his wise 
old mother, and it would have been well if he had 
submitted cheerfully to the injunction. He wrote 
rhymes upon all occasions; he made hymns 
which, at first, look well and sound well, but they 
never rise into the clear atmosphere of poetry, 
much less of spiritual attainment. During half 
a century he and his brother issued nearly forty 
hymnologies, which were of much greater value 
in those days than they are now. This humane 
man had a passion for falling in love and for 
writing verses ; he was thoroughly cured of the 
one, but he never was able to eradicate the other 
quality from his nature. 



332 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

The fact that stands out most clearly in Wes- 
ley's teaching is that conversion must be followed 
by amendment of conduct in every relation of 
life, a fact which many of those who are called 
by his name have lost sight of. He spoke with 
those who had votes in an ensuing election ; he 
would not allow them to eat or drink at the 
expense of him for whom they voted ; five guineas 
had been given to one member of the society, but 
the virtuous elector returned them immediately, 
and when he learned that his mother had received 
money privately, he could not rest till she had 
sent it back. Wesley expelled dishonest debtors, 
and the defrauding of the revenue was not toler- 
ated by him. He told the society at Sunderland, 
specifically, that none could stay in it unless they 
parted from all sin, particularly " robbing the 
King, selling or buying smuggled goods, which 
he would no more suffer than robbing in the 
highway." In Norwich he told the society in 
plain terms that they were the most ignorant, 
self-conceited, self-willed, fickle, intractable, dis- 
orderly persons he knew in the three kingdoms, 
and " God applied it to their hearts." 

Another discovery of Wesley's was, " that 
the preaching like an apostle, without joining 
together those that are awakened, and training 



JOHN WESLEY 333 

them up in the ways of God, was only begetting 
children for the executioner; without discipline 
nine in ten of the once awakened were soon faster 
asleep than ever." To this end he established 
societies, classes, and bands, with leaders, helpers, 
and stewards. They were entirely non-sectarian 
in character, but pressure from without, espe- 
cially the denial of the sacraments to them, drove 
them into the form of a sect or church, though 
Wesley strove against the development continu- 
ally, and warned the people against the madness 
of leaving the Church. Toward the end of his 
life, however, he saw that the movement was 
irresistible ; and he took the high ground that he 
had as much right as any primitive missionary 
bishop to ordain officials to administer the rites 
of an organization, which had now grown into 
a church ; as the connection grew, the possession 
of property was forced upon it, and to conserve 
it he was obliged to throw the societies into legal 
form. 

At the very beginning of his work, Wesley 
displayed that capacity for organization which 
finally brought his followers together as a distinct 
sect, and after his death enabled them to rise to 
the dignity of a church. He built and acquired 
meeting-houses — a name he abhorred ; he estab- 



334 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

lished labour colonies, to keep the needy amongst 
his followers from want and idleness. He was 
continually propagating schemes for the payment 
of debts, a form of activity from which the leaders 
of the Methodist Church are not yet wholly free. 
He raised money for the clothing of the French 
soldiers, who were living in misery in English 
prisons, appealing to the people in the strong 
words : " Thou shalt not oppress the stranger, 
for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye 
were strangers in the land of Egypt." His pri- 
vate charity was unbounded and it was given 
with open eyes as well as with open hand. After 
relieving the necessity of a certain Dutchman, 
he makes the wise observation, "I never saw 
him since, and reason good, for he could now live 
without me." 

Wesley's bodily vigour, his unfailing health, his 
capacity for enduring hardships and toil, have 
been a source of wonder from his time to our 
own. He preached three and four times a day. 
He rarely rode less than five thousand miles in 
a year, and some days from seventy to ninety ; 
he was beaten and stoned ; he lay in the open air 
till his clothes were covered with frost ; and he 
was drenched with the seas of the Irish Channel. 
His constitution does not appear to have been 



JOHN WESLEY 335 

unusually robust. From ten to thirteen, that is 
when he was a scholar at the Charterhouse, and 
the bigger boys used to seize the little fellows' 
meat, he tells us that he had little but bread to 
eat, and not plenty of that ; all his life he ate 
sparingly, and drank only water ; at seven and 
twenty he began spitting blood, and that con- 
tinued for several years. He was brought to the 
brink of death by a fever, and afterwards fell 
into the third stage of consumption ; though, for 
all his medical knowledge, we may well question 
his diagnosis of his own case. Yet upon his 
seventy-second birthday, he was led to consider 
how it was that he found just the same strength 
as he did thirty years before ; that his sight was 
better and his nerves firmer ; that he had none 
of the infirmities of old age, and had lost several 
which he possessed in his youth. 

Toward the end, as is ever the habit with old 
men, Wesley occupies the pages of his Journal 
with considerations of his youthfulness and his 
phenomenal health. After much discussion he 
concludes that his good physical condition was 
due to his rising at four o'clock for about fifty 
years, to his practice of preaching at five o'clock 
in the morning, which, he assures us, was one of 
the most healthful exercises in the world, and to 



336 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

never travelling less, by sea or land, than 4500 
miles in the year. This view of preaching as 
a healthy exercise is a new one, and a hygienic 
precaution, which, it is hoped, will not be too 
generally followed. One reads with envious long- 
ing of his gift for sleeping, and would willingly 
accept the most ultimate tenets of Methodism, if 
only they were accompanied by Wesley's " ability, 
if ever I want, to sleep immediately." Probably 
that is a vain hope, unless it also brought his 
evenness of temper : " I feel and grieve, yet I fret 
at nothing." 

The accounts of his growing age are pathetic. 
He found that with increasing years he walked 
slower, that his memory was not so quick, that 
he could not read so well by candle-light. At 
eighty-five he was not so agile, and could not run 
so fast as formerly ; he found his left e}^e grow 
dim, some pain in the temple from an old blow 
of a stone, yet he felt no such thing as weariness 
in travelling and preaching, and was not conscious 
of any decay in writing his sermons. In the last 
year of his life — he died at 87 — he confesses 
that his eyes are dim, his hand trembling, his 
motions weak and slow, j T et he felt no pain from 
head to foot ; only, it seemed as if " nature was 
exhausted." And so it was. 



JOHN WESLEY 337 

Prophecy is not an exact science. The issue of 
it is ever uncertain ; but if the prophets were to 
agree, the thing would come to pass. The He- 
brew prophets prophesied for a thousand years, 
and the Messiah came. They were a little astray 
in their geographical predictions and in some 
other details ; but in the main they were right, 
because they relied upon the profound knowledge 
that religious aspiration is a primal instinct, like 
the desire for food or the passion for propagat- 
ing the species. The bloodiest savages possess 
it; the great Apostle testified to its immanence 
amongst the Athenians, and we are not yet grown 
so mighty that we have put it underfoot. The 
voice has been still and small these forty years, 
whilst we have been wandering in the scientific 
wilderness. But the spirit of religion "revives, 
reflourishes, then vigorous most when most inact- 
ive deemed." Of science we may now say : 

His giantship is gone somewhat crest-fallen, 
Stalking with less unconscionable strides. 

The strife is over ; and silence has fallen upon 
the clatter of Huxley's shrewd knocks, upon the 
wild outcries of Bishop Wilberforce, and the 
tumult of the crowds which stood afar off to wit- 
ness the conflict, and either lamented or blas- 
phemed. We have settled all that. We have 



338 ESSAYS IN PURITANISM 

relegated the theologians to their own place, 
along with the logicians and the schoolmen. 
They had been fighting a corporeal presence w r ith 
a fine dialectical point. The scientists were 
thrusting at a spirit with their clumsy weapons. 
We have sent Science back to its laboratories, 
and every time it performs something useful to 
humanity we shall hear it gladly. 

Dull thing-, I say so, that Caliban 
Whom now I keep in silence. . . . But, as 't is, 
We cannot miss him : he does make our fire, 
Fetch in our wood, and serve in offices 
That profit us. 

If one were engaged in the laborious exercise 
of writing a tract, he might enlarge upon this ; 
but for the present I shall content myself with 
one remark. The Spirit of Eeligion, which is the 
larger part of Puritanism, is reviving ; it is 
amongst the men of science — the men who 
habitually deal with truth — that its operation 
is most clearly manifest, though probably some 
of them will be swift to deny the amiable charge. 
It is also manifest amongst the toilers for their 
daily bread, who deal with truth of another kind. 
They are saying at this moment, 

Be of good courage ; I begin to feel 

Some rousing motions in me, which dispose 

To something extraordinary my thoughts. 



JOHN WESLEY 339 

" The law is a schoolmaster to bring us unto 
Christ," said Saint Paul. There is a law of fear 
and a law of love. It is a strange phenomenon 
of the human mind that the thing which we fear 
greatly and justly, we afterwards grow to love. 
All men fear Death; in the end they come to 
love it. The voice of the Old Testament is, fear 
God. The Puritans, according to the saying of 
Joubert, were children of the Old Testament. 
In New England they were led into a new and 
better way by the spirit of the time, which was 
revealed chiefly in the Unitarian movement. In 
England the voice which bade fear give place to 
love was the voice of Methodism. It was through 
John Wesley that voice was given to the world. 

But even that is not enough for us. We have 
done with fear. We have need for love. And 
lest it be forgotten that I am speaking to a com- 
pany of artists, I shall say that we have the need 
also for beauty. In the future what is good in 
Puritanism we shall have ; that is, the beauty of 
holiness. What is good in Science we shall have 
— the beauty of Truth. What is good in Art we 
shall have — the beauty of Nature. 



(Cbe fiitoerjribe pce^ 

Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton &• Co. 
Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 



670 mm 

4 ^ , 
































- 






















































































"**. 










c> - 
















*Vt. 








r 






















































\ 


- 









































































































































•o. 




"W 



\ c 



^ v* N 






* *&> 






1^ • 









^^6 



^ - x ; A 



A A . , . "'?,. ' ' 



./ >•' 



^ ^ 



# ^ 



0' 



' 






.A 



** c : 






■^ 






<A 









^^ 










A v 



./V 






c^ 






x ^ 0° 



rt H -C 






v v * 







o N 









,Y»" 






,/' % 



- J*. 









^ >*' 



V 



/ . 






i. -V s 



C (V 



» -V" x si 



A- </> 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS . 

II II II 1 1 III HI II II I III I II 



027 211 124 8 



